SERV supercharges Land Registry call center with 8x8 + ServiceNow

SERV is based in Melbourne and has 170 full-time employees and 20 to 30 contractors. Its contact center is divided into two teams. One team handles property registration, where real estate industry professionals inquire about land or property dealings in Victoria as part of their assessment process. The other team handles LANDATA and sells certificates and copies of titles to the general public and professionals.

The Challenge: A clunky, outdated legacy system

Customer communications at SERV are primarily run out of the contact center, and the rest of the organization uses email and Microsoft Teams for chat, meetings, and occasional external calls. Before adopting 8x8, SERV’s legacy customer communications system was clunky, outdated, and prone to outages. In addition, it didn’t allow the organization to access critical data and insights.

“We have quite specific service level agreements with the State that we take very seriously,” says Jesper Hovrell, Head of Customer Experience & Operations at SERV. “Getting visibility into our performance at any point in time was challenging, as was managing appropriate staffing levels.”

So when the legacy contract expired, SERV engaged Contact Center Consultancy Creativ, led by director Michael Gonsalvez, to gather requirements and conduct a request for proposal process with several vendors, including the existing vendor, Amazon, and 8x8.

Hovrell recalls, “We were not just looking for a vendor, but for a partner that could be with us over the long term and grow with us. We also wanted a vendor with the right roadmap in place that would enable growth and continual improvement.”

8x8 fit the requirements perfectly with a superior employee and customer experience, core features that made a difference to the business, and robust analytics and reporting.

The Solution: Flexible and data-driven customer experiences

SERV, supported by project management and design services from Creativ, moved its customer service teams to 8x8 Contact Center and administrative staff to 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams, an integrated solution that enables external calls from within the Teams interface. Implementation was quick and seamless.

“We felt that our migration was very professionally handled. Clearly, the 8x8 and Creativ teams had a lot of experience,” says Hovrell. “Also, we always felt that they kept us in the loop every step of the way, and we very much appreciated that.”

A bonus was that 8x8 has an office in Sydney, Australia, allowing Hovrell and the team to make a quick call in local time rather than exchange emails with representatives overseas.

When everything was in place, the company’s change management team used 8x8’s educational materials to ensure everyone was properly trained on the new system. 8x8 even stepped in on launch day to set a celebratory tone with balloons and giveaways.

Since the initial launch, SERV has integrated ServiceNow into 8x8 Contact Center, which provides agents with a unified view of customer data. SERV again utilized the services of Creativ, who worked with both vendors to ensure the right solution was configured on SERV’s custom instance of ServiceNow to support its workflows. Now, whenever a customer calls in, an agent only needs to look at one screen to get all the information needed to provide assistance.

Going forward, SERV plans to explore more ways to use 8x8 across the business. For example, its new self-service portal for professional registration customers accesses data in ServiceNow, and the company is looking to layer on an 8x8 web chat component as well.

“If customers want to engage with us online, we are able to support them there,” says Hovrell. “But if they’d rather talk to us by phone, we'll be quite happy for them to do that as well. So we leave it up to the customer.”

The Results: Huge time savings for customers and agents

Moving to 8x8 has made a material difference to SERV’s day-to-day operations, which is highlighted by improvements to several key metrics.

“One of our requirements was that we should not need to ask the internal IT team or our vendor to make changes in our IVR. We needed to be in control of that,” says Hovrell. Because the team has been able to make those incremental tweaks themselves, they’ve reduced call volumes and transfers by more than 20%. They’ve also managed to redirect a lot of calls quickly that should have been handled by a different organization, such as the State. This helps to reduce frustration and improve the customer experience.

The ServiceNow integration has also made a big impact. The average handle time (AHT) has gone down by 20 seconds, which is significant for an average call length of four and a half to five minutes. The unified customer view allows agents to immediately see a repeat customer’s background and provide a tailored experience.

Hovrell sums it up: “With 8x8, we have improved service standards and quality for land titles and registry customers. We can better respect our customers’ time because we can deal with inquiries quicker. And on our end, it also saves us time, which in turn means we can better support more customers.”