Hunter Water is a state-owned Corporation providing drinking water, wastewater, recycled water and stormwater services to a population of almost 600,000 people in homes and businesses across Lower Hunter – Newcastle. Hunter Water manages an asset base of more than $2.5 billion worth of infrastructure, including 10,000 kilometres of water and sewer mains.
With 20 employees within their Customer Service Centre in Newcastle, their primary role is to ensure the safety of people within their community.
Objective:
To start utilising the Workforce Management capabilities within their existing Genesys Cloud platform to enhance contact centre processes and employee management, improve team visibility, and allow the primary focus to be on progressing customer journeys.
Challenges:
- Agents needed to gain familiarity and a clear understanding of Genesys Workforce Management capabilities. There was a general reluctance to change existing processes in favour of automation.
- Management relied on manual, repetitive tasks for vital business processes, leading to frequent errors across the break scheduling and rostering. This lack of visibility across the team limited their efficiency, flexibility, and engagement.
- Time-consuming processes such as manually writing break times and managing shift scheduling in spreadsheets significantly impacted the efficiency of the business and staff management.
- The leadership team needed more visibility into processes and staff activities and could not forecast and plan for future business, employee and customer needs.
The Solution
The primary goal was to get people on board and to use Workforce management’s capabilities confidently. Together with QPC, the Hunter Water management team began to roll out practical training and guides to agents to help them better understand the rewards of using a connected and automated system.
“We wanted to improve workflow efficiency and reduce the workload for our contact centre agents. The first step to doing this was to adequately use the capabilities Genesys Workforce Management provided, including the internal chat capabilities and day-to-day scheduling tasks. As a result, we have now reduced the overall workload of our agents by tenfold, and I am more available to support my team.” – Megan Harrison – Hunter Water.
Incredible Results:
- Hunter Water Management now has the visibility to gain valuable insights, monitor agent interactions, create schedules and break times, and roster additional staff during busier periods.
- Workflow efficiency and internal communication have improved, leading to high morale and overall staff engagement.
- Lower email numbers and a decrease in workload allow agents to utilise their skills better and promptly provide excellent customer service.
- Management has greater administrative visibility thanks to gents utilising the simple automated features, with team members who can now submit leave requests and receive approvals automatically.
- Rostering and scheduling are no longer manual processes; management can now view the day’s resourcing needs and ensure that agents are working on the right things at the right time.
- Improved reporting capabilities have allowed the leadership team to view metrics and data to make necessary changes to help improve response times, remove double-handling and provide agents with the support they need to manage customer enquiries.
“KPIs are being met. We have fewer calls coming through as agents now have the capacity to respond to more emails promptly, reducing the load of follow-up calls. As a result, our customers are happier, which means employees are happier too. ” Megan Harrison – Hunter Water