Innovation Group South Africa is a leading insuretech business that provides comprehensive operational support and a range of expert services to insurers, brokers, fleet managers and automotive manufacturers.
The company delivers market-leading claims management expertise via an innovative bespoke digital platform and outbound sales and inbound service support via a modern omnichannel contact centre.
“We operate in a high-paced environment, where we must continually respond to evolving customers needs and preferences, while working to meet weekly sales targets for our clients,” explains Brian Mariga, General Manager Operations at Innovation Group South Africa.
Furthermore, the company operates in the highly regulated financial services sector, which necessitates a contact centre management solution that ticks vital compliance and quality control boxes.
“We also required a solution that could seamlessly integrate with our digital platform, which allows us to fully optimise resources and leverage our customer relationship management (CRM) system,” elaborates Mariga.
Following an extensive scoping exercise to determine the company’s contact centre requirements, Innovation Group went out to tender to find the most suitable solution and implementation partner.
“Based on the scoping exercise, we knew that the Genesys PureConnect Customer Interaction Center (CIC) offered the optimal platform to match our business requirements at the time.”
According to Mariga, the feature-rich solution offered important functionality – like scheduling callbacks via the dialler platform and email functionality to handle inbound queries – and enabled the company to fully utilise resources to optimise service, deliver better engagement and increase sales ratios.
“It also gave us the ability to integrate our CRM platform, which is vital to the success of our operation as it enables us to leverage leads and reuse them to provide customers with valuable insights and relevant products, and personalised offers.”
As such, the company went through a due diligence process to find a suitable implementation partner and subsequently appointed local Genesys Gold Partner in South Africa, Connect SA (previously Pivotal Data).
While Innovation Group has encountered a few challenges related to upgrades since implementation, overall, the Genesys contact centre solution has delivered the capabilities and integration the company required.
The Innovation Group contact centre now supports 166 agents that handle 1 million outbound calls a month.
“By supporting us throughout this process with exceptional after-sales support, Pivotal Data has become a trusted technology partner that clearly understands our business strategy,” affirms Mariga.
“The team is always available when we need their support, and we constantly discuss our requirements with them. This relationship has been a critical factor in our success over time.”
Given the service provider’s entrenched role in the business, Connect SA (previously Pivotal Data) is ideally placed to propose new solutions as they become available, which can further enhance Innovation Group’s contact centre performance.
“The team finds solutions that really talk to us and meet our business needs,” adds Mariga.
A prime example is Innovation Group’s recent implementation of Callbi Speech Analytics, the first locally-developed speech analytics solution designed specifically for South African languages, accents and dialects.
A key feature of the Callbi solution is its ability to utilise advanced speech-to-text technology to organise, analyse, and operationalise contact centre interactions.
“There are many speech analytics solutions available, but only Callbi offers the ability to transcribe across local vernaculars, including isiZulu and Sesotho. The other solutions we considered missed the dialect and language capabilities.”
Mariga adds that the locally-developed solution makes business sense from a financial perspective, as licensing costs are not linked to the dollar exchange rate.
“The user experience on the Callbi solution is also exceptional. It is simple to use with its intuitive and easy-to-navigate user interface, which has improved the employee experience. We have also started implementing goal-setting to improve agent performance, which you can do on an individual or team level.”
Additional beneficial features include out-of-the-box compliance related to information sharing and POPI Act compliance.
“As an ISO-certified solution, the solution already meets international standards related to data protection and information sharing,” continues Mariga.
And as a cloud-based solution, Innovation Group can scale capacity up and down on demand.
“And we do not need to worry about upgrades – everything happens seamlessly in the background on the fly, which means we can benefit from updates and upgrades as they roll out. We do not need to go through intensive project management and planning, which is resource intensive.”
Additional benefits cited by Mariga include improved contactability across the organisation and the ability to track agent performance and review calls to improve quality.
“These features have helped improve the customer experience and elevate service levels while increasing sales ratios and meeting monthly client targets.”
The solution allows Innovation Group to perform quality assurance and compliance reviews across four languages, namely English, Afrikaans, isiZulu and Sesotho.
“Without Callbi, the quality assurance team would have doubled or tripled to perform a fraction of the call reviews we currently conduct using the solution.”
While the company currently uploads calls manually for review, the next step in its contact centre modernisation strategy entails fully integrating Callbi into the Genesys solution.
“Once complete, all calls will be automatically uploaded and will have the ability to review 100% of agent calls across all customers.”
While the implementation should be smooth and easy in principle, Mariga says there are a few security and infrastructure challenges the team needs to navigate before fully integrating and automating the Callbi solution into the Genesys contact centre platform.
Once Connect SA (previously Pivotal Data) and Innovation Group achieve full integration, Mariga says the company will look to implement individual performance reviews and measure return on investment (ROI).
“It is always a challenge to quantify ROI, but Callbi speech analytics lets you track it and visualise it.”
Beyond the integration, the next project phase will see Callbi expand into the Innovation Group sales environment and then into the inbound contact centre space as the company continues to leverage their contact centre solution to drive cost savings and unlock additional revenue-generation opportunities.
About Connect
Connect are the independent communications experts who can transform how your organisation communicates – both internally and externally. We deliver solutions and services that join up employee and customer communications across platforms, across sites and across countries, in three core areas: Contact Centre Solutions, Unified Communications and Network Services. We provide simple, elegant solutions to the most complex problems. www.weconnect.tech
Genesys contact centre software, Genesys PureConnect, Genesys Cloud, Genesys preferred partner South Africa, Cloud contact centre solutions, Contact centre management systems, Speech Analytics Software, Callbi Speech Analytics.