Superannuation and investment giant reduces contact centre staffing needs | Probe CX

The client

A financial services company providing superannuation, investment, financial advice and banking products.

The challenge

The company faced several challenges in their contact centre operations, both in-house and through third-party outsourcing. They lacked proper workforce management (WFM) capabilities, including capacity planning, scheduling and real-time monitoring. This resulted in productivity issues, inconsistent service levels and higher costs.

The client’s contact centres were underperforming, running at around 50 seconds average speed of answer versus their 25 to 30-second target. The lack of ‘contact centre 101’ WFM foundations across both their internal and outsourced operations was causing unplanned shrinkage and service challenges. In addition, the company had limited digital channels for customer communication and self-service; and lacked an operational rhythm to drive efficiencies without impacting customer experience.

They needed to increase productivity and reduce costs while maintaining profitable growth and delivering superior customer experience.

The solution

Probe CX was brought in to assess the client’s current bank contact centre operations and design a ‘best-in-class’ future state that would be scalable, efficient and sustainable. Probe CX conducted a thorough WFM analysis of the current operational and digital landscape, including an assessment of the existing digitally enabled contact flow. This provided the client with much-needed visibility into their operations.

The WFM analysis identified where productivity and staffing issues were most prominent in their contact centre, allowing the client to focus their efforts and resources on the problem areas. The WFM solution was implemented not just for the contact centre but across the client’s overall back-office operations.

Based on this analysis, Probe CX developed a transformation roadmap that outlined a phased approach to uplift and transform the contact centre. Key elements of this roadmap included:

• Implementing contact deflection strategies to reduce call volumes, including leveraging conversational AI technology from Oration by Convai.
• Initiatives to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS)
• Enhancing the complaints handling process, which was identified as an additional opportunity for improvement.
• Real-time management of skill sets to better support Probe CX and the client, specifically for handling ‘pending discharge’ calls.
• Upskilling the retention team to manage automated repricing request (ARR) emails more effectively.
• Cross-training two Customer Service Officers (CSO) from loan servicing to collections to improve resource flexibility and coverage.

Probe CX also created a future state solution design to project the expected shift in digital capability. The team modelled workforce needs based on volume forecasts, using both target and actual average handling time (AHT) scenarios.