Agile Digital

About the Client

This large superannuation provider has been building and protecting the wealth of its members over many decades. It manages over 10 retirement funds and insurance schemes for 80,000+ members. Key to their personal customer service is a friendly call centre team who handle over 250,000 customer calls each year.

Background

With each new type of retirement fund or insurance scheme offered to members a new ICT system was often introduced. This led to different ICT platforms that didn’t share fund records or support personalised customer-focused experiences.

Accessing “a single view” of customer information had become difficult for contact centre staff. As the service team became frustrated with inefficient technology systems the member experience sagged. Agile Digital were selected to address this challenge due to:

• Our broad experience with complex enterprise data integrations.
• Our track record for developing full-stack software solutions with highly functional user experiences.
• Our reputation for outcome-focused expert delivery teams that meet tight timeframes.

Initial work saw close collaboration with client teams to demonstrate delivery of an online service channel for smartphone users. This included advisory on agile ways of working and the development of a customer data hub to combine disparate member records into customer-centric information.

Mission

The goal was two-fold. Firstly, improve service efficiency by making customer information seamlessly and securely available to call centre staff. Secondly, enable a service workflow that improved the member experience.

This meant creating a unified and secure view of customer information that would enable call centre staff to provide prompt, accurate and personalised service to members. The strategy was to integrate and match sensitive and disparate member records from multiple legacy and bespoke systems into a customer service dashboard. The user experience of this dashboard needed to be:

• Intuitive and easy to use for customer service representatives.
• Compliant with Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) requirements.
• Easily extensible to accommodate future service offerings.

Success criteria included reduced call wait times and improved member satisfaction with the service.

Approach

We worked in close collaboration with the client’s business and ICT teams. This ensured that user needs were well understood and that technical constraints were being considered in the design and development of the solution.

A cross-functional delivery team created a data-rich platform that was integrated with the existing call centre IVR technology system. This gave call centre staff a unified view of customer information when handling service calls. The IVR system’s voice recognition technology was integrated so that the correct customer information was automatically available at call initiation.

Our practiced agile delivery methodologies and DevOps tooling enabled fortnightly production releases. This allowed the delivery team to remain open and responsive to new insights and changing priorities.

Capability uplift was also integral to delivering enduring value – with skills transfer in agile ways of working, DevOps tooling and cloud-native technologies.

Outcome

We delivered the first “single view of customer” call centre dashboard to live usage in the initial 6-month timeframe. The result was:

• Far shorter call wait times, with 96% of inbound calls now answered within 4 rings.
• Empowered staff with new systems to deliver friendly and efficient service to members.
• A better work experience that resolved staff retention challenges.

Following this initial success we continued in development partnership to deliver additional platform features and digital advisory for ongoing transformative initiatives.