Migrating to Genesys PureConnect future-proofs Rewardsco contact centre

As a leading provider of outsourced sales, distribution and after-sales support services to local clients in the finance, insurance and telecommunications sectors, Rewardsco Sales relies on its contact centre technology and highly trained, proficient staff to meet campaign objectives for clients, as well as the company's own sales initiatives.

“Rewardsco on-sells services, including upgrades and migrations, and 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,” explains Dwane Farquharson, Chief Technology Officer at Rewardsco.

“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 the company's leading-edge technological infrastructure and strong focus on salesforce training.

The Rewardsco outbound contact centre operation supports three divisions – a BPO operation that dials on behalf of customers 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.

The outbound contact centre currently supports 1,238 agents who utilise the Genesys PureConnect solution to make around 150 calls per second and around 1,000 calls concurrently.

“We initially operated TouchStar Call Center software on-premise but opted to migrate to Genesys when we lost direct support from the local service provider,” recounts Farquharson.

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 insights into the call,” elaborates 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.”

Farquharson, however, recalls that the implementation encountered a few pain points initially 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. 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,” continues Farquharson.

In the past, the dialler team would get pre-profiled data lists, load them once and then let the solution run. However, we have 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.

The Genesys PureConnect Contact Centre Solution also enabled Rewardsco and Pivotal Data to easily adapt and respond to Level 5 lockdown restrictions in 2020.

“We enabled 360 agents to work remotely during lockdown to maintain business continuity by remaining on the PureConnect dialler. We simply implemented a reverse-billed APN and VPN and broke out internally as if the agents were on our premises.”

The team has continued to build out Rewardsco's contact centre capabilities. For example, Pivotal Data integrated a locally developed speech analytics solution that can analyse local language phonetics.

“The solution enables us to feed all conversations that happen on PureConnect into our analytics engine to meet quality assurance and compliance requirements.”

Pivotal Data fully automated the voice analytics function so that no human intervention is 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 putting the platform or solution stability at risk.

Rewardsco currently uses the 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 to meet compliance and contractual requirements with customers, and plans to integrate the functionality into real-time training in the future.

Based on the numerous business and operational benefits realised from transitioning to the Genesys PureConnect Contact Centre Solution, Farquharson affirms Rewardsco's intention to remain on the platform.

“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.

“Our proven ability to effectively integrate Rewardsco's custom-developed solutions, and our own broad solutions set ensures we are ready to meet our customer's contact centre modernisation requirements now and into the future,” adds Reed.

“At our scale, 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.