New Zealand’s fastest growing 24/7 contact centre, 2B Connected was established just two years ago and already has close to 100 agents handling lead generation campaigns and outsourced customer service operations for clients in Australia and New Zealand.
“We created 2B Connected to do things very differently as an outsourced contact centre,” explains CEO Grant Walker, who set up the business with his wife Jemma Walker, who is 2B Connected’s General Manager.
“Our focus is on delivering the best call, every single time. We have achieved this by establishing a really good environment for our agents – living wage, flexible working conditions and a great purpose-built office space in Christchurch.”
However, 2B Connected’s telephony and contact centre platform has become a limiting factor with the rapid growth of the business.
“Our technology was reaching its limits both in terms of scalability, reliability and reporting,” says Grant.
A new inbound call centre contract for a major law firm was the catalyst for 2B Connected to investigate alternative technologies and select RingCentral as the ideal unified communications and contact centre solution for the business.
“We strive to deliver the best experience for our clients, and for our clients’ customers while keeping the agent experience front of mind. To do that, we needed a best-in-class contact centre platform, which is why we chose RingCentral.”
2B Connected and RingCentral worked together to set up a solution in parallel to 2B Connected’s existing production environment, taking calls for the law firm. The RingCentral solution was ready within a week, and took a much higher than expected 30,000 calls on the first day alone. To handle the unprecedented demand on day one, RingCentral’s team responded to an urgent request for help, setting up automated call routing, responses and voicemail recording in just 30 minutes to manage the massive call volumes.
Grant and Jemma are confident that 2B Connected will continue to grow rapidly in the ANZ contact centre outsourcing market. With NZ effectively eradicating COVID-19 and lifting all domestic restrictions in early June, the country has become a much more attractive and safer offshoring option for Australian organisations compared to other countries in the region.
“If you get the people and technology right – which we have done now with RingCentral – you are 90% there in terms of contact centre success,” says Grant. “As an offshoring location, NZ has the highest rated customer service in the world, and we have a 25 to 30 per cent cost advantage over Australian operations with fewer labour restrictions. As a proud Kiwi-owned company, we have a mission to continue to create new jobs and keep outsourcing within Aotearoa.”
RingCentral’s cloud, consumption-based solution, combined with its carrier-grade communications and extensive application integration and development ecosystem made it the perfect technology choice for 2B Connected.
“We are in a fiercely competitive space, and we know we need to automate and make things more efficient. We need to be able to scale up and scale down rapidly in response to our clients’ needs and unexpected call volumes. We also have to be able to adapt and be ready for the next change in the market – like incorporating other digital channels into our service offering. We also need to provide reporting transparency and self-service dashboards for our clients.”
“With RingCentral, we have a true technology partner and can continue to stay ahead of our competitors by leveraging their investment in R&D and continuing to improve the services we offer our clients.”
2B Connected is expecting to complete a second deployment of RingCentral Office and RingCentral Contact Centre to all agents over the coming months, which will be critical as 2B Connected continue to rapidly expand domestically and internationally.
Originally published 08 Dec, 2020, updated 04 Feb, 2021
