Biffa

At a glance

The issue:
As the business evolved and grew through acquisition, the contact centre required updating and future-proofing to improve customer communications.

The project:
Maintel and Biffa agreed a cloud-first approach and migrated the contact centre to an all-in-one omni-channel solution that improves both customer and agent experience.

The outcome:
Biffa’s cutting-edge digital contact centre will deliver outstanding customer experience, revolutionary reporting and agent empowerment, ensuring the business is fit for the future.

The Background

Prior to the covid pandemic, Biffa’s contact centres were under pressure following several years of organic and acquisitive growth. This was further heightened through the pandemic and complicated by the shift towards working from home.

As lockdown eased, Covid messaging for small businesses was changing daily, leading to high demand for contact from customers keen to understand the impact on their waste management services.

At the time, Biffa’s contact centre supported voice and email, with no ability to easily add further digital channels thereby restricting communication to customers, which resulted in slower responses to customer engagements alongside reduced effectiveness of proactive communications.

The Challenge

Biffa’s workforce management capability made it difficult and time consuming to accurately and reliably forecast demand and resource accordingly.  This not only impacted customers, but also affected staff who had to deal with some very challenging circumstances, which as a result saw high levels of employedisengagement and attrition.

As a progressive and dynamic company in a time of fast paced changing environments, Biffa were constrained by legacy technology which did not meet their current needs or support their future aspirations.

The Solution

As a business, Biffa’s cloud first strategy to the entire environment dictated a Contact Centre that followed suit. Genesys Cloud supported this approach by offering a multi-channel solution with cutting edge features optimised for the digital age.

The all-in-one contact centre provides powerful voice, digital, AI, analytics, and workforce management capabilities, and allows the business to choose to implement the channels and services that will make the most business impact while waiting to launch others as they become priorities.

Maintel recognised the importance of rolling out Biffa’s selected capabilities at the right pace, beginning with one contact centre and replicating the process to others, learning lessons along the way.

What are the benefits?

Along with enabling a multi-channel approach to improve customer experience, the business will be able to quickly change IVR messaging to move customers around contact centres more effectively and will be able to rapidly support and update their advisers.

Calls can then be routed to correctly skilled agents, enabling them to be geographically routed to local teams, bringing a whole new level of personalisation to this national organisation.

One of the biggest benefits was largely unexpected for Biffa. While they didn’t believe they had a problem with visibility, the Genesys platform has provided much greater insight into calls, including unwanted internal contact. Ineffective workarounds and irrelevant inter-departmental processes have been removed from customer services workflows, and contact management is much more stringent, saving both time and money.

There is also increased visibility of performance across teams. While Biffa doesn’t want to drive the business based on the blunt tool of AHT (Average Handle Time), they can now analyse those resource feeds to understand what’s driving them.

Moving workforce management to Genesys will allow the business to better anticipate customer demand. They will then be able to predict busy weeks and more accurately provide the right resource.

• The customer contact service is revolutionised: A cutting edge omnichannel contact centre and analytics delivered through a cloud portal can support Biffa in making informed business decisions.
• Call response times are reduced: As part of their evolving customer service environment, Genesys has played an important part in reducing average call wait times from 20 minutes to under 1 minute.
• Improved customer experience: Contacts will be routed intelligently to an agent, correctly skilled to meet that customer’s needs, including the option of geographical routing.
• Improved agent experience: Agents can now see their targets, performance and adherence and compare themselves to others, improving engagement and retention.
• Simplified workforce management: This will improve visibility and extensive reporting, which will provide for more accurate forecasting of contact volume and headcount needs.
• Minimal cost: Biffa challenged Maintel to provide a next generation contact centre as part of a larger contract without costs rising.

Whilst the initial requirement was an updated ‘like for like’ contact centre, Genesys offers extensive capabilities along with the flexibility needed to meet current business needs and provides a great foundation to easily realise additional benefits in the future.

Telephone will always remain a high demand channel, but alternative channels including chat bots, messenger and more intelligent use of IVR are being considered. Biffa’s customers often have complex individual requirements, but more transactional information exchanges will be deflected, triaged and referred to the new customer portal ‘MyBiffa’.

Other future projects include improved workforce management, email contact management, integrating with the CRM, and re-engaging the outbound dialler. Phase one of the transformation is complete, and Biffa are now perfectly positioned to implement other services and open more channels quickly and easily to meet future business objectives.