Zestlife’s contact centre achieves remarkable turnaround after optimising its Telviva investment

Improving contact centre efficiency.

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Zestlife is a financial services provider that offers insurance products, including gap cover, dental cover and credit protection. With such a wide and comprehensive array of insurance products, Zestlife has built its business on being passionate about its customers and treating them fairly. This requires efficient and effective management of customer communication and engagement. 

A contact centre is pivotal to customer experience and satisfaction as it is where customers interact with the business. The goal of every interaction should be to connect customers with the correct agent, who has context and the right knowledge to successfully resolve queries. A contact centre manager plays a crucial role in the organisation by ensuring everything runs as it should, but also to optimise operations for a more effective contact centre. Challenges include dropped calls, long wait times and no customer context visibility for agents.

Craig Swain took over the role of call centre manager for Zestlife in 2019. Not new to the business then, he knew what the goals of the business were and could see exactly where the contact centre was falling short. At the time, the call centre was set up with unstructured inbound calls with long wait times for customers, due to difficulties in managing call routing and unacceptably high dropped calls. This meant many customers or potential customers were not receiving a resolution to their queries.

This was caused by no one in the business understanding the systems that underpinned the contact centre. Zestlife had already implemented the Telviva suite of products, but was not using them optimally and barely scratched the surface of the technology’s capabilities.

Because Telviva was already implemented, the process of turning around the contact centre was far easier. One of Telviva’s strengths, outside of the actual technology, is a managed services model that enables customers to learn, manage and deeply understand the technology. Through the Telviva technical team’s close collaboration with Swain, the Zestlife staff gained an understanding of how to set up and effectively deploy the Telviva solutions.

The process involved optimising the Telviva investment with a commercial alignment between Zestlife’s needs and Telviva’s solutions to meet these needs. This took the shape of streamlining the contact centre set-up, working closely with the Telviva team and deliberate staff training on the use of the Telviva platform and its functionalities.

The contact centre’s effectiveness and efficiency improved radically. As of March 2024, the average wait time had been reduced to 16 seconds, which is exponentially better than the long waits previously. Importantly, there has been a significant decrease in dropped calls and an impressive improvement in call routing accuracy, which has resulted in improved customer service and increased sales.

Beyond the commercial benefits for Zestlife, optimising their Telviva suite has also increased the efficiency and productivity of their contact centre agents. By understanding the product suite better, Swain, as call centre manager, is able to monitor the contact centre operations effectively, knowing that support is only a click away. Ultimately, the successful turnaround of the contact centre has enabled flexibility, agility and scalability for future growth.

Swain says the remarkable turnaround was directly attributed to the ongoing live support he and his team received. “Telviva speaks the language of someone who doesn’t understand technical jargon. They make everything easy and simple to understand. Their turnaround times when we log tickets are simply remarkable.

“By way of example, in 2020 during the lockdown, all staff suddenly had to work from home. Besides enabling this switch to a remote contact centre working within a day through Telviva One and Telviva Mobile, they guided us on how to deal with many different internet connections, routers and technology, and taught us how to route calls to consultants efficiently. This kind of hands-on guidance continues today, and agents have great flexibility in how they access and use the Telviva platform.”

Swain says there are plans to deploy more capabilities using Telviva Engage to seamlessly integrate various communication channels in the future.

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