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Datacom hears Humm out on contact centre revamp

Implements new platform, provides consultancy services and working on voice assistant.

Datacom has streamlined buy-now-pay-later company Humm’s call centre platform to a single solution used across countries in Oceania and ASEAN.

While Humm is located in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK, its contact centres are in the former two countries as well as the Philippines.

The project, which took place in 2020, involved taking Humm’s existing call centre structure, which included a mix of telephony systems, and replacing it over a six-month period with a platform from call centre software vendor Genesys.

However, Humm was unable to completely utilise the new platform and brought in Datacom in an advisory capacity as well. This saw the multinational's staff spend five weeks at the fintech learning about its processes, products and employees.

“When you implement a new telephony system, you don’t know what you don’t know,” said Brendon Clark, workforce optimisation manager at Humm.

“You just stand up what you previously had. By working with Datacom we were able to identify where we were adding unnecessary complexity. Datacom helped us find ways to get better outcomes, reducing complexities for agents so it’s easier for them to do their job.”

With the new platform in place, Humm can now flow calls through its three contact centres, allowing one centre to receive calls when another one is overrun, which Clark referred to as “one of the biggest game changers”.

“We only have budget for a certain number of people, so moving the calls means we can handle more volume,” he said.

“We can move with the sun, providing longer call centre hours in all our locations without local people having to work those hours. It’s been amazing for us.”

Large call volumes are also being managed by providing customers the option to access an online chat website for their issues, which has reduced wait times on voice channels.

Additionally, Datacom and Humm are also working together on a virtual assistant in order to direct customers to the most relevant channel for their enquiry.

“Datacom is with us right throughout. They empowered us to be able to use our IVR [interactive voice response] better, so instead of logging a ticket and paying Datacom to make a change, we can now do it ourselves,” Clark said.

“That has saved us time and saves on our invoice, which I really appreciate.

“It’s great working with Datacom. They’ve been a real game changer, allowing us to use our scale as a strength and having happier customers who talk us up. It’s a very competitive market and this gives us a point of difference.”

Datacom's use of Genesys solutions has not gone unnoticed by the software vendor in the past, as last year the multinational was crowned Genesys' Australia and New Zealand Partner of the Year.