With 8x8, Abri is set up to grow and deliver CX excellence

The Challenge: Improving reliability and preparing for future growth

Abri had an outdated communications system that was not reliable and lacked the flexibility, agility, and functionality needed to deliver modern tenant experiences. Due to the lack of stability in the previous system, teams were spending too much time focusing on troubleshooting as opposed to delivering good customer experiences. Staff morale was low with agents coming into work expecting the system not to work and tenants being unable to get through to speak with an agent. Communication with customers and between internal staff members was becoming increasingly frustrating, which resulted in an unwelcome, negative perception of the organization, as well as a negative impact on employee and tenant satisfaction scores.

For Abri to achieve its growth objectives and to become the customer service leader it envisioned, a system change was needed. This change had to deliver on the immediate needs of the organization and provide a platform that would enable continuous improvement and support the longer-term objectives of the organization.

The Solution: Delivering better CX with greater flexibility, integrations, and analytics

Abri required a reliable telephony solution that enabled people to make and receive calls and included a future-proof platform that could be built upon to sustain growth and drive customer service objectives. And that's exactly what they achieved with 8x8.

As Abri implemented 8x8 Work and 8x8 Contact Center, the team started off with simply replacing the current system. "From a technical perspective, 8x8 has been extremely easy to implement and administer,” says Peter Stephens, Head of IT Operations. “Having the console all in one place and intuitive user interfaces makes it really straightforward.”

Soon afterwards, they moved on to take further advantage of 8x8’s flexibility and ease of integration with other business systems in order to increase efficiency. They also began using 8x8’s built-in reporting and analytics features to monitor and improve their level of service.

In particular, 8x8’s Microsoft Teams integration was very important to Abri, and the team found the integration to be very straight-forward. Having one platform and UI for the wider business teams proved to be a great success. Users no longer had to jump in and out of different platforms and were able to have a single view of what they needed to deliver.

The housing sector is under a lot of pressure to maintain high levels of customer service across large volumes of contacts, and 8x8 has made it really easy for Abri to identify and react promptly to the most important requests. With the large volumes of contacts the Abri team receives, it can be really difficult to understand their customers' true issues. 8x8 makes it easy to cut through the noise and identify what the problems are. Using speech analytics and text analytics, the team can identify what's important and address these issues faster.

"There's so much about 8x8 that I genuinely enjoy, but probably my favorite feature is the reporting.” says Tom Ramadan, Head of Customer Contact at Abri. “With 8x8, there's so much available out of the box. Also, the ability to customize and schedule reports and sentiment analysis is so simple, it allows us to get to what we need really quickly.”

The Results: Simplifying IT management

Since adopting 8x8 for contact center agents, Abri has seen significant improvements in response times. Reporting and analytics have made a big difference to operations with out-of-the-box reports saving managers and supervisors time, and allowing them to become more effective and focus on what really matters.

"8x8 has met all of Abri’s requirements and we are looking forward to adding more features and functionality to deliver more to our customers,” says Ramadan. Next, Abri is looking to roll out contact center functionality to its Revenue teams, so they can benefit from the integrations and functionality. The organization is also planning to implement 8x8’s web chat and SMS features.

In addition, staff feedback on 8x8 has been very positive, resulting in a 37% increase in the annual employee Satisfaction Score. They found training to be straightforward, and 8x8’s intuitive UI made it very easy for everyone to adopt the new system features.

“Centralized administration with intuitive user interfaces makes 8x8 very easy to set-up and manage,” says Stephens. “There are no caveats around how new people are set up, and how new VCCs and call queues are delivered. The turnaround time for delivery and for configuration has been pretty quick, and actions that previously needed IT resources can now be handled easily by the call center managers.”

With 8x8, Abri now has a stable platform that will enable the organization to deliver on its growth and customer experience objectives.