James Palmer-Dale (Spark)
Spark has retired a mix of legacy platforms and migrated to the Genesys Cloud CX contact centre platform to support a flexible service model.
The investment would enable New Zealand's largest telco to further transform its customer experience and improve service delivery, Spark said.
“As we already offer Genesys Cloud CX to our business customers, we understood the benefits the solution offered," said James Palmer-Dale, Spark's lead for customer engagement solutions.
Spark employs more than 1400 staff across its contact centre, virtual and retail channels as well as an offshore call centre in Manila to respond to tens of thousands of calls, messages and enquiries daily.
The initial implementation of Genesys Cloud CX had been a remarkably smooth process, Palmer-Dale said, and it was already supporting Spark's "unified frontline" strategy.
Unified frontline is a Spark business model that upskills customer facing teams across a variety of disciplines and then dynamically moves teams to match the ebb and flow of customer needs.
Staff working in a retail store, for example, could shift to answering contact centre queries when the store is quiet while contact centre teams can move to support a specific call queue when demand goes up due to an outage.
“With the core contact centre solution in place, and the weekly customer-driven new feature releases from Genesys, we’re well positioned to expand our customer service capability in both voice and digital channels, and benefit from the bot, artificial intelligence, and machine learning capabilities to further improve services to our customers, engaging with them where they want to talk to us," Palmer-Dale said.
The move to Genesys Cloud CX also reduced Spark’s technology footprint. The number of servers required fell from 300 across multiple sites to just twelve. It also slashed maintenance, allowing the telco to focus on new developments and innovation.
“Spark is even more equipped to approach every customer interaction with empathy, safe in the knowledge that they have the tools to deliver exceptional experience and personalised service across all touchpoints," said Kim Duncan, NZ partner account director at Genesys.
On the customer front, Spark reported it had guided Contact Energy in its rollout of Genesys PureCloud contact centre.
While Spark is a Genesys partner its Digital Island unit is an Amazon Connect specialist.
