Mazda goes Zoom Zoom through COVID-19 with QPC, Call Journey and Genesys PureCloud.
Mazda Australia is the world’s largest importer of Mazda vehicles, with customers serviced via 141 national dealerships. Located in Melbourne, Victoria, Mazda Australia’s Head Office employs over 250 staff with state offices also in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia.
Mazda’s award-winning range of passenger, SUV and Utility vehicles are designed to enhance owners’ lives from the moment of acquisition, creating an emotional connection that endures throughout the ownership experience. That connection can be summed up with a simple phrase: ‘Zoom-Zoom’.
Their staff live this connection every day, following the pathway set out in Mazda’s Corporate Vision:
1. Brighten people’s lives through car ownership.
2. Offer cars that are sustainable with the earth and society.
3. Embrace challenges and seek to master the ‘Doh’ (path) of creativity.
It is this path of creatively challenging the status quo that drives everything they do, both now and into the future.
The Challenge
Mazda Australia’s vision revolves around two simple words: Zoom-Zoom. As Mazda states on its website:
“From the way our cars look, to the way they drive, these two words encapsulate everything we strive for. They represent excitement. They represent connection and the thrill of the drive. They represent us, and they’re in everything we do.”
When the time came to upgrade Mazda Australia’s call centre facilities it sought a multi-channel platform that was intuitive to use, modern and cost-effective. In short, it was looking to add more ‘Zoom-Zoom’ to its systems.
The Mazda Australia team took its time to investigate a range of options in market. This proved to be an eye-opening experience as it sought to strike the right balance between immediate efficiency and future capability.
When it came time to review PureCloud by Genesys, QPC Australia wasn’t the only partner presenting this solution, but they were the only one able to demonstrate their strength in Genesys’ product knowledge, solution implementation, and provision of on-going support.
“Once we implemented PureCloud we quickly understood what this allowed. If we hadn’t delivered PureCloud when we did, we wouldn’t have been able to manage customer workflows and allow the team to work from home remotely,”
With its 30-seat call centre, Mazda needed a partner that could implement, train and support the team, especially when it came time to extend the platform’s capabilities and integrate it further within the business. QPC had the solutions: they could explain the benefits, the implementation process, and displayed a deep knowledge that indicated they could support Mazda as a true partner. It was this expertise that proved Mazda had found the right partner with the perfect soluon.
The Solution
Mazda was impressed by the presentation QPC delivered on PureCloud by Genesys: it offered capability beyond what was required and came in on budget.
“QPC came in and understood the product, answered our questions, brought in the partners they work with, and clearly demonstrated their areas of expertise. We had a high level of confidence that if we went with QPC we would have a great solution and a great relationship based on experience and trust,” stated Mazda Australia.
Mazda’s new contact centre implementation commenced in October 2019, and along with PureCloud by Genesys, they were also seting up Call Journey to provide full voice transcription of all calls into the contact centre.
Mazda is a customer services business and its call centre team can end up in some challenging customer conversations. When their customer network is spending five figures on a new and highly valued product, stress levels are increased and expectations are high.
Call Journey’s voice transcription service is crucial for Mazda in understanding customer issues and determining the best ways to handle them. It also indicates to the customer that Mazda is taking their call seriously by keeping a record of the conversation.
The full solution was rolled out in the contact centre on 12 February 2020. Mazda went live with voice and email queues internally, externally and with a Partner. There was still final work to be done on the systems, and training the team was yet to be scheduled, but everything was moving in the right direction.
Then on 12 March 2020, only four weeks later, Australia went into lockdown once it became clear that COVID-19 was spreading too quickly across the country. Despite the dire circumstances, Mazda couldn’t have scripted this situation. Thankfully, QPC was there to assist with transitioning its workforce to the remote environment.
COVID-19 had a large and immediate impact on Mazda’s business. The quetion being asked by the Mazda team was: How do you get the technology into people’s houses?
“Once we implemented PureCloud we quickly understood what this allowed. If we hadn’t delivered PureCloud when we did, we wouldn’t have been able to manage customer workflows and allow the team to work from home remotely,” remarked Mazda Australia.
The PureCloud implementation formed a key component of Mazda’s business continuity plan, and they were highly impressed with QPC’s ability to leverage the system so quickly. Within 7 days of lockdown commencing, the QPC team had transitioned the entire contact centre from office-based to working effectively at home. Every element was operational and had been adapted with ease.
The Benefits
Once the contact centre’s agent team had been fully trained on the new telephony platform, the benefits provided by the new infrastructure quickly became evident. Agents can now readily access client details with screen pops displaying information as soon as calls are received.
“Usually such an implementation would have numerous IT challenges, but this system didn’t let us down“
“We had a testing plan with two staff members working remotely, but it turned out that everyone was remote by the end of the week. The team quickly adapted and succeeded because the platform was always online. As a result, it was straightforward to transition everyone to a remote work capability.”
Once the team was set up at home, Mazda Australia started to look at other challenges and what else was needed to support staff and customers. Six weeks later, Mazda Australia came to QPC to ask about setting up the ‘Chat’ functionality to improve the customer experience across an increased number of interaction channels.
At that stage there had been no plan to have the widgets set up on the Mazda website, so this meant geting their digital agency and QPC together to hash out a plan. As soon as the technicalities had been finalised, QPC said: “Let’s just turn it on and see if it does what you want it to do!” The trust that had developed between Mazda and QPC by this time meant once again the implementation worked perfectly.
In Mazda Australia’s words, “We purchased a product and it did exactly what QPC had stated. In the IT space that’s a big win. The entire solution has been ideal from cost, efficiency and capability perspectives.”
“There is nothing quite as satisfying as seeing a customer so thrilled with their implementation that they keep coming back for more. Mazda were placed in a very difficult situation when the country went into lockdown. They had only just implemented PureCloud and training was yet to be delivered to their team. Their determination and tenacity to push forward and enable their call centre team to immediately be set up from home and learn on the job is testament to their organisation’s vision – Zoom Zoom”, commented Peter Levine, Commercial Director at QPC Australia.“We had a testing plan with two staff members working remotely, but it turned out that everyone was remote by the end of the week. The team quickly adapted and succeeded because the platform was always online. As a result, it was straightforward to transition everyone to a remote work capability.”
Once the team was set up at home, Mazda Australia started to look at other challenges and what else was needed to support staff and customers. Six weeks later, Mazda Australia came to QPC to ask about setting up the ‘Chat’ functionality to improve the customer experience across an increased number of interaction channels.
At that stage there had been no plan to have the widgets set up on the Mazda website, so this meant geting their digital agency and QPC together to hash out a plan. As soon as the technicalities had been finalised, QPC said: “Let’s just turn it on and see if it does what you want it to do!” The trust that had developed between Mazda and QPC by this time meant once again the implementation worked perfectly.
In Mazda Australia’s words, “We purchased a product and it did exactly what QPC had stated. In the IT space that’s a big win. The entire solution has been ideal from cost, efficiency and capability perspectives.”
“There is nothing quite as satisfying as seeing a customer so thrilled with their implementation that they keep coming back for more. Mazda were placed in a very difficult situation when the country went into lockdown. They had only just implemented PureCloud and training was yet to be delivered to their team. Their determination and tenacity to push forward and enable their call centre team to immediately be set up from home and learn on the job is testament to their organisation’s vision – Zoom Zoom”, commented Peter Levine, Commercial Director at QPC Australia.
What’s next?
The Mazda team can see the future benefits that PureCloud and Call Journey bring to their organisation, both internally through process improvement, and externally by improving customer experiences.
Their next implementation stages will be the integration of their CRM into PureCloud, and to further reduce the number of calls coming into the contact centre team by incorporating their online FAQs using a Chatbot.
A lot of integration work needs to be completed before their CRM can talk to PureCloud, this was delayed preventing an extra burden being placed on the business and the IT team while the company transitioned to working remotely. To allow the call centre team to focus on more important, high value calls, they will also transfer their existing online FAQs into a Chatbot. They already have a knowledge base on file, and by incorporating the questions and responses into a Chatbot will free up the team’s time.
Something that is not yet in the plan but could be considered in the future, is how to integrate Mazda’s social media accounts into PureCloud. Regardless of what the future holds, QPC are ready to support the Mazda team as their needs transform.