Superpartners streamlines contact centres

Superpartners is the backbone of many superannuation funds. The name may not be immediately familiar, but chances are most Australians have spoken to one of their contact centre operators. Providing customer call centre services is only one of the company’s functions, but being the largest superannuation administrator in Australia, CIO Gary Evans and Head of IT Operations Sinan Erbay knew the importance of getting customer relations right.

“We have five call centres that provide superannuation services to some six million members and over 700,000 employees. We service super funds like Hesta, AustralianSuper and Cbus,” Evans said.

With such a large operation and responsibility, both Evans and Erbay saw the need to upgrade its call the technology, beginning the rollout 18 months ago.

“The previous contact centre solution had technology that wasn’t doing what we needed,” Erbay said. “Integration into our existing systems was quite complex. Managing and running the contact centre with 500 staff obviously meant we didn’t want the structure to fail.”

Having surveyed the market, Evans and Erbay chose a Telstra solution and are beginning to see the benefits of the upgrade.

“From a deployment point of view, it was quite seamless. We were running five contact centres that were operating throughout Australia, a number of different platforms and there was no continuity. Telstra came in to manage it and there was hardly any disruption to any of our services,” Erbay said.

Superpartners took six months to transition to the new platform and Erbay said as well as having a single platform servicing its users, the project benefits include a reduction in costs. The planned return on investment is three years.

“Being in a sector where the contact centres have a large amount of staff movement, we do need to ramp up and down quite quickly,” Erbay said.

Evans said in addition to choosing the right partner, CIOs looking to move to a similar contact centre solution should ensure they plan efficiently.

“Working with a partner that knows what they’re doing is important and Telstra provided us with the right people. But make sure you think any deployment plans out and that you have the people in place. It’s about having the right planning and capability up front.”

Superpartners is now working on several software updates, as well as looking at the possibility of moving to the cloud.

“We’re installing software packages and updating a number of our websites,” Evans said. “We’re reviewing our strategy in this area. Over the next 12 to 36 months, we’re looking at our own private solution that will provide us with a data centre,” he said.