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Brighter Super

RingCentral’s cloud-based platform has completely transformed customer and employee experiences at one of Queensland’s leading super funds, and the platform has scaled and evolved to meet the customer service and operational needs of Australia’s first three-party superannuation merger.

brightersuper.com.au

It was a very good investment in RingCentral’s cloud-based platform; because of that we are able to be so flexible.

Nisha Varma

Contact Centre Team Leader, Brighter Super

KEY STATS

Providing the ability to accurately capture and measure customer sentiment.
Scaling with the rapid growth from 150 up to 1500 calls a day and a six-fold membership increase.
Seamless transition and integration of three separate contact centre operations.

Brighter Super is a Queensland-based superannuation fund that has provided trusted and reliable investment, advice, and insurance for more than 50 years. In 1965, Brighter Super was formed as the superannuation fund for Queensland local government employees and their spouses. In 2017, Brighter Super became an open fund – which means it is open to the wider community and can welcome new members from many different sectors and industries.

On 1 July 2021, Brighter Super merged with Energy Super. The merger was by way of a Successor Fund Transfer (SFT) which involved Energy Super members and their benefits being transferred to Brighter Super. The merger created a single fund, which is managed by LGIAsuper Trustee.

On 1 April 2022, Brighter Super completed its acquisition of Suncorp Portfolio Services Limited (SPSL). The acquisition brought together like-minded funds to provide more benefits for members and created Australia’s first three-party superannuation merger.

As a group, Brighter Super manages $30 billion in investments on behalf of 250,000 members (as at 30 June 2023).

Customer experience key to competitive edge

When the Australian Government opened the superannuation industry so that anyone could join any super fund, it created a far more competitive environment.

‘What inevitably happened was that members of super funds had a much greater choice of who looked after their retirement funds and this inevitably saw greater movement between funds,’ said Nisha Varma, Contact Centre Team Leader, Brighter Super.

That put the focus on customer service as one of the key differentiators for funds like Brighter Super to both retain current members and attract new ones. However, in 2020 and prior to its merger with Energy Super in 2021 and acquisition of SPSL in 2022, the much smaller Brighter Super had a contact centre platform that was unable to support a fully-fledged, omnichannel customer service operation.

INDUSTRY

Financial Services

HQ

Brisbane, Australia

YEAR FOUNDED

1965

EMPLOYEES

188

Searching for compelling contact centre capabilities

At the time, Brighter Super had embarked on a major upgrade to increase the functionality of its Salesforce CRM platform, had outsourced its back-office administration operation, and was in the process of negotiating its first merger with Energy Super, marking a difficult time to consider the introduction of new contact centre technology.

Our initial thoughts were to tackle the ‘nice to haves’ that we couldn’t deliver with our existing telephony platform like post-call surveys and call backs.

Nisha Varma

Contact Centre Team Leader, Brighter Super

In reviewing the market, Brighter Super had very specific requirements for a new platform. It needed to capture verbatim comments, provide different scoring scales, including the ability to capture and measure net promoter score (NPS) and have the capability to generate instant alerts via email or SMS if a member gave a low score during post-call surveys.

When we lined up the different vendors, RingCentral came out well on top by offering significantly more functionality than we were originally looking for and at a far more competitive cost.

Nisha Varma

Contact Centre Team Leader, Brighter Super

Rather than just deploying RingCentral post-call surveys as an add-on solution for its existing contact centre platform, Brighter Super quickly realised that RingCentral Contact Centre was an ideal, cost-effective platform that delivered greater functionality and stability than its existing solution. It also offered the ability to move the interactive voice response (IVR) to a different queue and continue operating in a business continuity planning (BCP) disaster or evacuation scenario. RingCentral also delivered the self-service capabilities and flexibility Brighter Super needed to record new on-hold or promotional messages as well as program IVRs. With RingCentral, any moves, additions, or changes are completed directly in-house, where this previously required Brighter Super to raise a support ticket with its managed services provider (MSP).

The big question which was asked when we were presenting the proposed RingCentral solution to our executive team was, “Why hadn’t we done this before, and why did we wait so long?”

Nisha Varma

Contact Centre Team Leader, Brighter Super

Brighter Super effectively deployed the RingCentral platform without disrupting or taking focus from the two additional major projects that were in progress at the time.

Expected benefits and features borne out through deployment

When the new system went live in November 2020, Brighter Super’s original assessment of the benefits of moving to RingCentral had been realised.

"When we decided, “this is how we want our IVR to be set up, these are the prompts we are looking at, this is the flexibility that we need”, nothing was too difficult for RingCentral’s Professional Services team. Anything that we wanted, RingCentral was more than happy to accommodate. The journey we are going through with RingCentral has been quite amazing," said Varma.

RingCentral’s intuitive user interface also makes it very easy to learn, to the point that the two hours Brighter Super had set aside for agent training was barely required as the team became comfortable with the new RingCentral system very quickly.

"My experience with RingCentral has been that the features and capabilities that we particularly wanted to have, have happened. A good example is our post-call surveys. If a member gives us a low score, then there is an alert that goes to all the team leaders. We listen to the call, and if we see there is coaching that needs to be provided to the consultant, we do that. We also contact the member. If the agent has done everything well, we can say to the member "We can see that we received a low score, is there anything that we can do to make it better?" There have been a number of instances where this has resulted in us improving our processes," said Varma.

This level of efficiency has been critical for Brighter Super as it rapidly scaled from managing 45,000 members to 250,000 members through the merger and acquisition process, while simultaneously scaling the volume of agents required to manage its membership growth.

RingCentral’s comprehensive reporting capabilities also ensure that Brighter Super’s CEO and Executive Leadership Team have the necessary visibility and regular updates on the grade of service that members receive through the contact centre.

Creating integration and scale

Brighter Super has RingCentral embedded within Salesforce, giving contact centre agents access to a softphone within the platform so that, when calls come in, agents already have the relevant member details in front of them.

The integration with Salesforce keeps all member interactions and associated notes in one place. Every incoming call creates a case, consolidating call recordings, call notes, disposition codes, and post-call survey results into a central location.

That gives us all the information we need about that particular member interaction. That makes things so much easier when we are investigating scenarios or member feedback.

Nisha Varma

Contact Centre Team Leader, Brighter Super

After initially being rolled out to 12 agents, the contact centre effectively doubled once the merger with Energy Super was completed. The transition was smooth. Brighter Super migrated the Energy Super contact centre to RingCentral before the merger, so all that was required post-merger was to change the IVR number to the new location. That meant the new agents were already familiar with the new user interface and system which made the transition much easier.

The feedback was actually that the new RingCentral and Salesforce systems were so much easier than the ones they had been used to!

Nisha Varma

Contact Centre Team Leader, Brighter Super

With the acquisition of SPSL 12 months later, Brighter Super successfully replicated the approach, and now has a 55-60 seat contact centre, seamlessly operating on the one integrated RingCentral and Salesforce platform.

Now operating a much larger contact centre, Brighter Super has also switched on RingCentral’s Workforce Management (WFM) and Quality Management (QM) modules.

"WFM was something really new for me as well, as a team lead, but we have been able to build a lot of efficiencies by incorporating the RingCentral WFM module,” said Varma. "For example, the tool has given us the evidence we needed to develop a business case to invest in more resources, to ensure we are meeting our contact centre SLAs."

Omnichannel capabilities, analytics and unified communications business-wide

After three years of rapid change and growth, the environment in the contact centre and the wider business is starting to stabilise, giving Brighter Super the opportunity to implement additional features and functionality in the RingCentral platform. That includes leveraging greater business insights from RingCentral’s analytics and reporting software, introducing RingCentral’s omnichannel customer service capabilities, combining voice, email and web chat functionality, as well as follow-up cases raised through Salesforce, to be managed and actioned in the contact centre queue.

The reliability and functionality of RingCentral as a unified communications platform have opened the eyes of the whole organisation, with the expectation that RingEX will also replace Brighter Super’s current IP telephony solution to further enhance communication across the organisation.

It was a very good investment in RingCentral’s cloud-based platform and because of that we can be so flexible. Inducting new people and expanding the contact centre has been quite easy.

Nisha Varma

Contact Centre Team Leader, Brighter Super