With customer service considered one of the most important strategic differentiators for organisations in the digital age, insurer Platinum Life contracted Saicom to implement a nationwide telephony solution to improve its call centre environment and enhance client engagement through superior call quality.
โIn 2015, we moved our head office to Illovo in Johannesburg, but were still reliant on an analogue telephony environment. Given that the new building had fibre, we took the opportunity to migrate to a cloud based digital telephony solution, and partnered with Saicom. At the time, we had to cater for 350 phones.
The migration went well, and as our business continued to grow, we extended our partnership with Saicom,โ says Raymond McIntyre, senior general manager for Platinum Life.
Over the next four years, Platinum Life grew its footprint and opened an 80-seater office on the West Rand; 60-seater in Pretoria and a 350-seat call centre in Potchefstroom, split across two buildings and most recently, two 50-seater branches in Centurion and Midrand.
โIn the space of a few years, we went from a 350-seater environment to more than 1 200 seats with Saicom giving us the telephony foundation to service our customers with confidence.
The differentiator for us is Saicomโs ability to deliver both customer service and technical expertise. The team took the time to understand our business requirements and ensured any issues would be addressed as quickly as possible,โ says McIntyre.
He believes it is because of a strong technical and customer-centric partnership between the two companies that has resulted in improvements in client engagement from the insurerโs perspective.
โFor our business, voice quality is everything. It is not just about cutting costs โ we want to provide our customers with a superior call experience. Even so, Saicom has been competitive on the cost side and really provided us with the technical people that understand the importance of customer service.
Call downtime has been eliminated and our business has gone from strength-to-strength thanks to the Saicom telephony environment,โ concludes McIntyre.
