Accredited Power

Accredited Power Saver Co (‘Accredited Power’) is an Australian-owned national energy efficiency installation company that has been installing energy saving solutions and lowering energy bills since 2011. The company is Australia’s largest residential LED installer with its head office and call center in South Australia, and operations in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Accredited Power also offers residential energy efficiency and management services, smoke alarm and solar installations and commercial lighting services, and has established a presence in the US, servicing California and upstate New York.

A significant proportion of Accredited Power’s business is represented by LED replacement projects, particularly where State government energy saving schemes have made it either free (in Victoria) or just $33 (in NSW) for householders to replace their inefficient and outdated halogen, incandescent and compact fluorescent lights.

The most effective marketing campaigns for LED replacements have been printed letterbox mail drops, which Accredited Power had been advertising with national 1300 phone numbers, so that inbound calls could be managed centrally through its Adelaide call center. With Accredited Power receiving between 400-500 calls a day and charged for the time of each call received, these 1300 numbers used to cost the business up to $6000 a month to operate.

The call center was reliant on a traditional NEC PSTN phone system, which gave the business no visibility on call volumes and queuing status, and required frequent and expensive on-site visits from technicians to fix problems or implement changes.

A radical change

In early 2020, Accredited Power realized that a radical change was needed, and decided to upgrade to a RingCentral Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution and the RingCentral Live Reports add-on feature for a dashboard of real-time performance data and call queues. These applications were made available for all users.

“We started the implementation in January 2020, because I could predict that we were going to have a problem. When COVID first hit, we had to come to a position where we could still have inbound calls, but people had to work from home,” said Damian Broadbent, Finance Director & Company Secretary, Accredited Power.

Accredited Power also equipped all staff with laptops, which meant that when everyone had to work from home during lockdown, it was a quick and seamless transition.

“It was fantastic. The business continued on without missing a beat! Essentially the call center was all together in the office one day, and the next day we all moved to our different homes – and from a customer perspective, it made no difference,” said Broadbent.

Ironically, when lockdowns ended in Adelaide, and its call center agents were able to move back into the office, Accredited Power faced another major challenge. The company had moved into new premises but had a long wait for its NBN connection activation. Using RingCentral, the call center was fully operational in the new office for ten weeks running just on a 4G access point.

The new RingCentral solution has given Accredited Power the opportunity to try something new with its direct marketing. Whereas it had previously advertized national 1300 phone numbers in its pamphlets, Accredited Power could now use local numbers, which meant the business was immediately saving up to $6000 on its monthly phone bills. It also had a positive impact on the customer experience.

“With RingCentral we are able to easily set up our own call queues. We have different marketing programs going on, so we can use different numbers and pipe those calls through to different call queues and the right internal skill sets. By using an 02 number in NSW or an 07 number in Queensland, customers in that State felt like they weren't ringing a national call center; they were ringing someone local,” said Broadbent.

Building trust and customer engagement

Another big advantage in having everyone on the same UCaaS platform is that it has allowed the Adelaide-based call center agents to do a live call transfer to Accredited Power’s separate scheduling team based in Melbourne, so that an appointment can be scheduled on that first call. Previously, Accredited Power had to ring the customer back to schedule a time, which might add another 10-15 minutes in trying to reach the customer on the return call. Through the RingCentral app, the call center agents can check on the availability of the scheduling team before transferring the call, and communicate any additional information to them using RingCentral’s in-built team messaging.

The Live Reports dashboard allows agents to see the live calls taking place in real-time in the scheduling area, adding to the positive experience.

“On everyone's desk, we have two screens. One screen is for our own internal booking system. The other screen has RingCentral LiveReports continually showing. So now everybody across the organisation has visibility over call queues, and that's very, very important for us. If one of our managers sees six in queue, they can quickly sort out what’s going on.”

“Our agents can see how many operators are available and be able to say to the customer, ‘they’re all busy at the moment, would you mind hanging on for a minute?’ From a customer’s perspective, we become very easy and professional to deal with, we’re meeting their expectation that the installation can be scheduled with this first call, and we get a lot of good feedback about the experience,” explains Broadbent.

As a result of the enhanced customer experience and communications functionality, Accredited Power is getting a much higher conversion rate on its direct marketing campaigns and has achieved productivity improvements across its call center and scheduling teams of between 30 and 40%.

Internal collaboration and auditing improvements

Accredited Power has been able to use the trust established with the customer and its own productivity gains to invest more time into post-installation call backs for feedback and satisfaction, which also gives agents an opportunity to promote other energy efficient services the company offers.

More importantly, as the company is delivering services under a number of Federal and State government schemes, accountability and auditability are critical requirements. Accredited Power’s RingCentral platform records, timestamps and stores every call, with recordings very easy to search, retrieve and replay. That’s also allowing the management team to review recordings to improve scripting for new campaigns, and provide coaching and training for call center agents.

Accredited Power uses a third party company based on Malaysia that audits all its LED installations – with the auditor set up as a user on Accredited Power’s RingCentral platform so that the two teams can communicate easily and in real-time using video, voice, file sharing and team messaging, This allows any photos from installations, call recordings and other documentation to be shared in real-time between the businesses to quickly resolve any issues or questions that emerge through the audit process.

Accredited Power also makes use of RingCentral’s communication platform to deal with any customer issues or questions in real-time with colleagues across different locations, and team meetings and one-on-ones now all take place using video across Australia.

Now, the company is investigating integration opportunities with its CRM platform, looking forward to ongoing feature releases in RingCentral apps, and developing further insights into customer experience, sales opportunities and productivity improvements through the analytics and reporting capabilities of the solution.