Paywise

After a poor initial experience in migrating its telephony and contact centre to the cloud, a switch to RingCentral’s integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solutions has delighted Paywise staff and customers. This leading Australian salary packaging provider now has a stable, fully featured and high-performance communications environment, and the platform it needs for future business growth and customer service innovation.

www.paywise.com.au

Since deploying RingCentral, we’ve had a very positive response from our users – with the majority of feedback being that they preferred this platform over our previous one, and that it works!

Mike Whait

General Manager of IT Paywise

KEY STATS

RingCentral open APIs enabling Paywise to integrate with and build additional CRM functionality into the existing customer software platform, streamlining operations.
Feature-rich contact centre solution enhancing agent and customer experience.
New cloud telephony platform delivering high availability and reliability, at a reduced monthly operating cost.

Headquartered in Perth and with offices in major cities across Australia, Paywise is a leader in salary packaging solutions for public and private entities, helping more than 30,000 employees around Australia access more of their salary by paying less tax. Its clients include small, medium, and large employers in an array of industries, including government, education, mining, financial services, legal, accounting, and human resources.

To satisfy the needs of clients and their employees, Paywise combines the delivery of remarkable customer service with simple salary packaging and employee benefits.

INDUSTRY

Financial Services

Perth, Australia

YEAR FOUNDED

1989

EMPLOYEES

150

Creating in-house CRM functionality

Paywise had recently cut over to an all-in-one cloud-based telephony, contact centre and CRM solution. However, frequent service outages, dropped calls and poor on-the-ground support from the vendor and its partners were having a significant negative impact on customer experience and operational effectiveness, so the decision was made to replace the solution as quickly as possible.

After completing a comprehensive review of comparable solutions in the market, and undertaking due diligence on features, functions and pricing, Paywise selected RingEX and Contact Centre; an integrated Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) platform. RingCentral’s ability to easily integrate with third party applications convinced Paywise that building its own CRM would be far superior.

“With all the API functionality available in the RingCentral platform, we realised we could develop all the CRM functions ourselves on the internal systems we already had and integrate with our telephony and contact centre platform that way,” said Mike Whait, General Manager of IT, Paywise.

Minimal impact of transition

The cutover to RingCentral was very smooth. An additional advantage was that the new handsets and headsets already purchased as part of the earlier cloud telephony migration were compatible with RingCentral. The result was minimal impact on Paywise end users and minimal deployment costs, and the new RingCentral platform is also operating at a reduced monthly operating cost compared to the former solution.

“Since deploying RingCentral, we’ve had a very positive response from our users – with the majority of feedback being that they preferred this platform over our previous one, and that it works!” said Whait.

While it is largely managing the RingCentral platform in-house, Paywise is also using RingCentral Enterprise Support for more complex issues and troubleshooting.

“We do not reach out to RingCentral support very often, but when we do, the response has been quick, and I get a straight answer immediately on what is going on,” said Whait.

Paywise used its own in-house development team to build the additional CRM functionality it needed into its existing customer software platform.

“That removed a lot of double handling we were doing, improving our operational efficiency and the speed of our response to customer queries,” said Whait.

“It’s given us one source of truth for all our member profiles and reduced our overall call handling times,” said Kelly Fontana, General Manager Operations, Paywise. “The difference it has made for some of our agents blows my mind.”

Enhancing customer experience in the contact centre

The biggest impact for Paywise from switching over to RingCentral has been in the contact centre. The call back feature has been enthusiastically embraced by customers, with between 25-40% requesting that service, allowing Paywise to manage peaks and troughs in demand without affecting customer experience. Customers are usually contacting Paywise while at work, so requesting a call back and maintaining their place in the queue is often the preference.

“The benefits of our call back feature are being highlighted regularly in our customer reviews,” said Fontana.

The integration of RingCentral with Paywise’s software platform has enabled Paywise to roll out a 24-hour IVR option for customers to check the balance on their Paywise digital smart cards – which has been invaluable for customers working in remote areas (such as mines and Aboriginal communities) without reliable Internet access.

Integration with Microsoft Teams, plus a shared contact centre and unified communications platform across the broader organisation has increased the visibility of the contact centre and improved collaboration and interaction with all parts of the business.

“When there are lots of calls coming in, as a business now we are all involved, and we can interact more easily with our colleagues. Previously we had very limited visibility on what was happening in the contact centre and it was hard to work together,” said Fontana.

Contact centre team leaders are using the quality management features of the RingCentral platform to build a picture of the patterns and trends of the agents and can either cherry pick or schedule regular reviews of calls. Sentiment analysis and reporting on calls is giving greater transparency for agents and team leaders, improving both agent and customer experience. The flexibility of the RingCentral platform also makes it easier to tweak disposition codes in response to the reporting and analysis provided by the system.

Future plans using AI and workforce management

In addition to managing the voice queue, Paywise contact centre agents are also managing live chat, giving customers an alternative channel for routine enquiries. Paywise has plans to use RingCentral’s AI capabilities to automate some of the routine enquiries, including Paywise Card balance checks.

“The more a chatbot can answer the simple questions, the more time our agents can spend talking to customers with more complex needs,” said Whait.

Another enhancement being considered is the adoption of workforce management (WFM) to improve activity forecasting and better align resource scheduling with activity volumes.

That’s just two of the innovations Paywise is planning to roll out in the coming months.