Rewardsco Sales relies on its contact centre technology and highly trained staff to meet campaign objectives and drive lifetime value for B2B and B2C clients, as well as our own internal sales initiatives. In order to meet client expectations and scale our operations efficiently, we needed to transform our infrastructure to ensure we remain at the head of the pack, not just today but well into the future.
“Rewardsco on-sells services, including upgrades and migrations, up-sells and cross-sells on behalf of the three major mobile network operators in South Africa as well as numerous customers in the insurance sector,” says Dwane Farquharson, our Chief Technology Officer. “We also sell our own line of products and provide an end-to-end, outsourced after-sales support service offering.”
Farquharson credits the company’s market success to its leading-edge technological infrastructure and strong focus on salesforce training. This is where Genesys comes in.
The outbound contact centre currently supports over 1 682 agents who use the Genesys PureConnect solution to make around 150 calls per second and around 1,000 calls concurrently as at 2021. These numbers will grow rapidly in the future as we expand across local and international markets.
The Rewardsco outbound contact centre operation supports three divisions – a BPO operation that provides customer support and dials on behalf of cients to generate leads and sales, an internal division that sells directly for Rewardsco, and direct sales support for digital sales queries received directly from Rewardsco’s Mondo.co.za e-commerce site, as well as digital partners across South Africa.
Rewardsco selected Pivotal Data to realise the company’s strategic contact centre transformation ambitions. The need to customise various outbound dialler capabilities meant that the implementation evolved over time to integrate the necessary functionality.
“We developed a bespoke front-end interface that serves digital scripts, tracks how far agents get into scripts, identifies pain points and up-skilling requirements, and provides other important insights,” says Farquharson.
“Our need to integrate into the Genesys solution was vital to the project’s success, and Rewardsco’s in-house development work on the Interaction Center Web Services (ICWS) integration layer into Genesys PureConnect ensured our success.”
The implementation encountered a few hurdles at the beginning as ICWS was not yet an established platform to integrate the outbound dialler with bespoke web pages.
“It was a big learning curve for us but since we ironed out that aspect of the integration, everything has run smoothly,” explains Farquharson, however, the team has continued to build out capabilities and add new features, such as real-time digital lead processing. “We need to meet various qualifying criteria from different credit providers before we can implement live inserts into the dialler to meet regulatory compliance requirements.”
In the past, the dialler team would get pre-profiled data lists, load them once and then let the solution run. Now, Rewardsco has now developed the ability to insert lists into the dialler throughout the day, which significantly improved operational efficiency, productivity and user experience on our digital platforms.
Genesys PureConnect also enabled Rewardsco and Pivotal Data to easily adapt and respond to COVID-19 level 5 lockdown restrictions in 2020, enabling 360 agents to work remotely to maintain business continuity. “Rewardsco implemented a reverse-billed APN and VPN and broke out internally as if the agents were on our premises,” explains Farquharson.
The team continued to build out Rewardsco‘s contact centre capabilities, including the integration of a locally-developed speech analytics solution for contact centres that can analyse local language phonetics. This enables Rewardsco to feed all conversations that happen on PureConnect into our analytics engine to meet quality assurance and compliance requirements. The voice analytics function was fully automated so that human intervention is not required to feed data into the analytics engine.
Rewardsco can now process voice data in near-real-time and the platform pushes data continually throughout the day into the data analytics engine without risking the stability of the platform.
Rewardsco currently uses these recordings for profiling and training purposes, with the ability to segment sales interactions per engagement and not just per call, as a sale can often span multiple calls or interactions. “Rewardsco requires a complete view of every conversation in their contact centre to meet compliance and contractual requirements with customers, and we plan to integrate the functionality into real-time training in the future.”
“As one of the leading Genesys partners in South Africa, with our unrivalled implementations and support regularly recognised at the OEM’s regional Partner of the Year awards, we are ideally positioned to support Rewardsco‘s contact centre operation,” explains Karl Reed, Chief Solutions Officer at Pivotal Data.
“At our scale, Genesys PureConnect is the best platform for us. We also intend to stay with Genesys due to the solution’s ability to handle a high dialler call rate per second. The voicemail detection capabilities are also brilliant, and we’ve successfully implemented lead capture per agent, which streamlines operations and improves performance,” explains Farquharson.
