Vodafone Australia re-platforms its customer channels

Vodafone Australia expects a “huge project” that saw it re-platform customer contact channels throughout last year will save it $3 million a year in technology and labour costs.

Customer operations support general manager Jarrod Creagh told the Genesys G-Summit A/NZ that Vodafone migrated all its channels - including voice, chat, email and call recording - to run on Genesys’ Engage cloud platform.

It is also using additional features of the platform including predictive engagement, workforce management and speech analytics.

“There's multiple reasons why we embarked on this project,” Creagh said.

“Firstly, we needed to set up a foundation for some of our future roadmap but also bring ourselves to a point where we could start to realize some benefits for our customers immediately. 

“We did take on an ambitious timeframe to try and implement everything within 2019. We also [took] quite a consultative approach with Genesys so that we could get those benefits as soon as possible and move onto our next big thing.”

Creagh said the platform had helped Vodafone forecast service needs and roster “to match that, but also [to] get real time visibility over how our staff are actually adhering to that.” 

“We are expecting $3 million per annum in OpEx savings across platform and labour costs,” he said.

“We have got that through an increased workforce efficiency - greater than five percent.”

Of the newer capabilities enabled through Engage cloud, Creagh said Vodafone hoped to find “new revenue streams through the use of speech analytics to understand the ‘voice of the customer’ as we're launching new products”. 

“In addition, with predictive engagement we're now targeting the customers at the point where they need our help, and therefore maximising our conversion, in our digital-assisted and digital channels.”

Creagh said Vodafone Australia was “one of the early adopters” of the Engage cloud platform, and that it had “really put the platform through its paces”. 

He said the telco had been well supported by Genesys on the rollout, and the two remained engaged.

“We are talking with them around our future roadmap, our desire to improve customer experience while also saving a little bit of money along the way.”