QBANK

KEY STATS

• Greater and more immediate visibility on member sentiment and customer interactions
• Quicker resolution of employee and customer issues and concerns
• Cost-effective access to a rich set of communications features plus improved regulatory compliance
• Increased flexibility to adapt to hybrid working models without impairing on customer service or employee experience

QBANK is a member-owned financial services provider that was established as Queensland Police Credit Union (QPCU) in 1964, converting from a credit union to a bank in 2016 and rebranding as QBANK. As one of the only dedicated providers of banking products and financial services to the Queensland Police and Emergency Services sector, QBANK’s commitment is to provide simple, low cost, accessible banking to those who serve Queensland.

While it has more than 25,000 active members, QBANK operates from only three physical locations – its head office in the Brisbane CBD and branches located at the Emergency Services Complex in Kedron and the Queensland Police Academy in Oxley. As a result, QBANK members rely predominantly on internet banking and the call centre to access bank services.

QBANK operates primarily with an outsourced IT infrastructure and support model, and had been using an on-premises Cisco IP telephony and call centre solution before switching to a hosted Avaya IP telephony and contact centre platform, which incorporated wallboards and a third party call recording product. However, the newer solution was not able to function effectively in a disaster recovery scenario with staff working from home or in a remote location.

The major problem with both solutions had been call recording, making it difficult for management staff to find calls, conduct effective quality assurance (QA) or for the solution to be functional for staff working from home. There was no granularity in the reporting data and only a two-day window each month to generate QA reports, making it difficult for contact centre management to respond immediately or drill down on the data to identify and address any specific agent performance or service level issues.

“Call recording was a big issue with our data stored offsite with a third party. We couldn’t immediately get into and listen to a phone call recording if we needed to, especially when it came to an escalation or a complaint, or possible compliance breach,” said Julia Reid, Chief Operating Officer, QBANK.

Jayde Cox, Manager – Distribution at QBANK, who was the contact centre manager at the time, explains the reporting problem: “from a contact centre perspective, I was out of the business for a whole three days, because I had to focus on reporting for our board. In addition to that, there was no value provided back to the team and you couldn't coach them because the data was already a month old.”

With its telephony contract approaching renewal, QBANK conducted due diligence on alternative unified communications and contact centre solutions available in the market. Those solutions had to meet QBANK’s obligations as an APRA-regulated financial services organisation, particularly the requirements to keep data within Australia.

QBANK chose RingEX and Contact Centre, a cloud-based integrated unified communications and contact centre platform, which not only complied with APRA’s onshore data retention requirements, but also provided QBANK with the features and high-availability needed for a mission-critical service.

“RingCentral offered us five nines [99.999% availability], which works out to be unscheduled downtime of just over five minutes a year. Whilst a significantly impressive offer in itself, it was also financially backed,” said Paul Stevens, Manager – Technology Operations, QBANK.

“In addition, the new RingCentral solution worked out to be virtually cost neutral compared to our old system. However, RingCentral stood out for the richness of the data we were capturing, the customisation we could do and the ability to manage the system ourselves.”

Managing the solution in-house

The ability for QBANK to manage the RingCentral platform in-house was put to the test immediately, with QBANK completing its own rollout, supported by RingCentral Professional Services who configured some core features, as well as new contact centre call flows and queues.

Running a Citrix Desktop environment, QBANK chose to deploy RingCentral with physical handsets in the office and branches to ensure dedicated network connectivity and quality of service for voice traffic.

“Setting up the hardware was really simple. When we received all the hard phones, each one was encoded with the serial number and corresponding extension, which we could cross-reference against our list and tweak. The day before cutover it was just a matter of putting the right phone on each person’s desks and connecting it, so it didn’t take long at all,” said Rollie Parame, Technology Support Officer, QBANK.

QBANK’s support team had about two weeks prior to go live to familiarise themselves with the administration interface and features, including the highly customised settings they could apply for each user or department in the organisation.

“The RingCentral admin console is great. We love the fact that we can have different templates for different departments, so that when a new user comes on board, we can just create them using the right template and then it is pretty much done,” said Parame.

The support team also provided customised training for users.

“The system is fairly intuitive for end users use, so it was as simple as people attending a short training session and then sending everyone a PDF training guide afterwards with a ‘click this button to do this’ and ‘this button to do that’ instructions. There wasn’t much after care support needed at all,” said Parame.

Staff with dedicated laptops use the RingCentral softphone client and staff working remotely or from home can access RingCentral via the web client, contact centre software or mobile app.

“If we are working from home, we get the same support from a phone perspective and access to all the same contact centre features as we do in the office,” said Cox.

The detailed data captured by RingCentral has allowed QBANK to use RingCentral’s analytics and reporting to easily troubleshoot and resolve any user issues. In one instance, one of QBANK’s departments was concerned that it was receiving a lot of calls for a different department after changes had been made to the IVR. QBANK’s support team was able to review the data from individual calls to confirm that callers were choosing the keypad option number they knew from previous calls rather than listening to the new IVR recording. In another instance, a staff member working from home was experiencing calls dropping out. The issue was quickly diagnosed as a poor fixed home internet connection and WiFi network, so once the user switched to their 4G/5G mobile service everything was fine.

Building quality management and customer satisfaction

QBANK’s approach to its new RingCentral platform is that it’s an investment not a cost to the business, explains Reid.

“It's important that we utilise our investment in RingCentral to the best that we can, continue to look at new features and constantly improve the experience both for our members and our own users. As a contact centre consultant, you want to have a cool system to work with that makes your job easier.”

After about three months of call recording and analysis to establish a baseline, QBANK switched on the QA features of the RingCentral Contact Centre solution enabling the organisation to better understand the voice and sentiment of the customer, identify any trends or issues with members, and use the data to better inform decision-making at the board level and for coaching and continual improvement initiatives within the customer service team.

“When the Reserve Bank decided to increase interest rates, we did some analysis behind our calls. We were able to see how many phone calls we were getting about the subject, and the member sentiment behind those phone calls. Were they angry? Were they neutral? Were they happy? And because we had that data, it helped us to build things out and respond to our members’ concerns,” said Stevens.

This reporting and analytics capability was just as crucial for QBANK to respond effectively to the impact of the Queensland floods in mid-2022, and any other local, national or global issue impacting members.

“I know what I need to focus on from an efficiency point of view. I can tell our board exactly what our top five dispositions were – top five member interaction calls – for the month, with the amount of calls that we had per that disposition and the average handle time. Within half an hour of the Optus data breach being reported, our contact centre manager had created a new disposition called ‘data breach’, allowing us to keep a complete and accurate record of how many calls we received relating to Optus. We then coached our agents on how best to respond to our members’ concerns. As a result, I was able to quickly report to the CEO, and effectively the board, the number and nature of the calls we received relating to the Optus data breach.” said Reid.

Overall, the immediate visibility and accessibility provided by RingCentral to team leaders and managers is making all the difference.

“We’ve got the ability to get super granular on our searches, and there are all different ways to find what we are looking for. The ability to listen to the call as it's happening is just fantastic. It allows instant coaching. So, if someone is not doing the right thing from a regulatory perspective, I can tell them right away, ‘hey, don't forget, you've got to do the outbound call script’. That's a game changer,” said Cox.

QBANK prides itself on delivering exceptional personal service and financial wellbeing to those who protect and serve the community. In an often-challenging environment, its member satisfaction surveys rank QBANK amongst the top banks in Australia.

The RingCentral platform ensures QBANK can maintain this customer service level, particularly in its lending team.

“Our members don’t like to be kept waiting, so we manage and closely monitor a KPI that our lending agents have an availability of 33% during their working hours, which means we can respond to member’s queries immediately,” said Cox.

Feature-rich future opportunities

While QBANK is primarily using the RingCentral UCaaS and CCaaS platform for voice communications, the organisation has its eye on utilising a richer set of features in the future to enhance both the employee experience (EX) and the customer experience (CX).

With plans to move from private data centres and utilise more public cloud infrastructure, QBANK will have the opportunity to give users more access to the RingCentral client and the extensive collaborative features of the application. Similarly, QBANK is also investigating the omni-channel features of the RingCentral Contact Centre to offer more alternatives to members, by incorporating web chat, SMS communications, email and possibly even social media into the contact centre queue.