Sports Betting Provider.
Connect makes sports betting provider a star in customer service.
Sports betting is a multi-billion dollar business globally and is extremely popular among South Africa’s passionate sports supporters. According to results from the TGM Sports Betting Survey conducted in South Africa in October 2022, 49% of the population bet on sports betting within the last 12 months.
To facilitate these transactions, bookmakers operate a mix of physical bet shops and offer multiple online channels via web and mobile to place bets.
And with the high transaction volumes, especially over weekends, bookmakers need robust multi-channel contact centre capabilities to answer queries about wagers, withdrawals, account issues, and more.
The business need.
When a Durban-based sports and entertainment betting operator experienced robust customer growth, the company required a more efficient way to track customer queries from inception to completion across multiple channels.
The contact centre’s primary channel is chat, as customers tend to reach out for support while on the website or mobile app logging a query. If queues are long and responses too slow, customers tend to reach out on multiple channels, typically switching to email, social media, then voice, resulting in multiple tickets.
At the time, the betting operator had multiple siloed systems in place to manage inbound and outbound voice and digital engagements, which made it impossible to aggregate tickets generated from separate channels.
Relying on multiple managed services and solutions providers to deliver and manage these disparate customer interaction and contact centre technology solutions became increasingly onerous from an admin, resource and cost perspective, particularly as interaction volumes rose in unison with its customer growth.
In addition, the operator’s international operations serving multiple markets in Africa and the UK and Ireland were operating on separate, outdated instances of Zendesk Chat that were not integrated with Zendesk Support.
Our solution.
The operator wanted to implement a single platform to consolidate all customer engagement channels and disparate systems together to unlock operational efficiencies.
The company also wanted to improve the customer experience (CX) through greater automation and self-service capabilities for their clients while offloading volumes from contact centre agents.
The operator approached Connect (formerly illation) to assess their operation and recommend a suitable contact centre solution that met their strategic objectives.
Connect’s Business Enablement Services (BES) team spent three days on site analysing the contact centre and network architecture to scope solution options. Following the detailed analysis, Connect recommended implementing Zendesk Suite Enterprise as a single point of aggregation for all customer service queries and channels.
The BES team plotted a phased implementation, starting with an integrated voice channel for inbound and outbound calls, email and chat, with various social media channels migrated afterwards.
Initially, Connect deployed the chat channel using standard Zendesk Chat to mirror the environment that agents previously used, and later upgraded to Zendesk Messaging, which allowed for integrated bot functionality that offered customers an opportunity to use guided menu selections to segment the reason for the interaction and provide relevant knowledge articles.
In terms of bespoke solution requirements, Connect developed a custom Quality Assurance application that operates within the Zendesk side-bar and Verint WFM Professional to enhance the agent experience for the more than 700 agents, and provide contact centre managers with important feedback on performance metrics.
In addition, Connect developed solution functionality that checks for any outstanding tickets from the same requester within a specified timeframe, and automatically merges these tickets without needing agent intervention.
The outcome.
The implementation started in April 2022 and took nearly six months to complete. Since going live, the solution and services have delivered increased visibility, enhanced operational efficiency and the ability to scale the platform according to the operator’s needs as the business expands.
The automated ticket aggregation developed by Connect SA improved efficiency by reducing duplication in the system that can clog up queues and reduce average handling times (AHT).
The migration to Messaging effectively enabled persistent chat and provided greater visibility into the true nature of customer enquiries, which were predominantly related to tracking financial transactions, particularly queries about deposits that were not reflecting in a customer’s betting account, or queries about fund withdrawals from a betting account into a banking account or various cash withdrawal payment mechanisms.
The BES team has identified a need to enhance existing integration between Zendesk and the operator’s legacy systems, particularly payment portals.
This deeper integration will deliver automated interaction self-service that does not require agent assistance to improve CX and reduce agent call volumes to create operational efficiencies, giving agents more capacity to assist with opening new accounts and growing the business.
Once this integration is complete, the bot will be able to provide the customer with an update on which stage their payment (deposit or withdrawal) is in and manage their expectations in terms of how soon the funds will reflect in their respective account.
Connect SA continues to provide business enablement services to the operator, including application configuration, consultation and business support.
The BES service level agreement (SLA) includes making necessary changes to the Zendesk platform, adding new functionality, any development needed to streamline processes, and integrate new services between the Zendesk solution and the operator’s back-end systems.
Additional functionality brought online recently includes the integration of the Connect Business Intelligent Platform (CBIP) with Zendesk to provide in-depth customisable reporting capabilities required by the company’s C-suite.
Connect SA built the application to extract data from multiple systems and formats. The solution aggregates the information into a customisable dashboard providing a single view for top-level management. The solution allows in-depth analysis, with the ability for executives to drill down into the underlying databases to extract specific business insights, such as trends around channel usage and relevance to inform strategic investment decisions.
IAbout Connect.
We’re Connect, a global business communications expert with over 30 years’ experience. We have a clear and simple purpose; to help people communicate better. We make this happen by powering frictionless journeys and providing secure networks that benefit organisations, their people and their customers, building towards a brighter, more sustainable future for all three. By leveraging our expertise in CX and automation, we orchestrate connected experiences. And while we are trusted by many technology vendors, we’re independent of all of them, enabling us to make the complex simple. www.weconnect.tech
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