QBANK is a member-owned financial services provider that was established as Queensland Police Credit Union (QPCU) in 1964, converting from a credit union to a bank in 2016 and rebranding as QBANK. As one of the only dedicated providers of banking products and financial services to the Queensland Police and Emergency Services sector, QBANK’s commitment is to provide simple, low cost, accessible banking to those who serve Queensland.
While it has more than 25,000 active members, QBANK operates from only three physical locations – its head office in the Brisbane CBD and branches located at the Emergency Services Complex in Kedron and the Queensland Police Academy in Oxley. As a result, QBANK members rely predominantly on internet banking and the call centre to access bank services.
QBANK operates primarily with an outsourced IT infrastructure and support model, and had been using an on-premises Cisco IP telephony and call centre solution before switching to a hosted Avaya IP telephony and contact centre platform, which incorporated wallboards and a third party call recording product. However, the newer solution was not able to function effectively in a disaster recovery scenario with staff working from home or in a remote location.
The major problem with both solutions had been call recording, making it difficult for management staff to find calls, conduct effective quality assurance (QA) or for the solution to be functional for staff working from home. There was no granularity in the reporting data and only a two-day window each month to generate QA reports, making it difficult for contact centre management to respond immediately or drill down on the data to identify and address any specific agent performance or service level issues.
“Call recording was a big issue with our data stored offsite with a third party. We couldn’t immediately get into and listen to a phone call recording if we needed to, especially when it came to an escalation or a complaint, or possible compliance breach,” said Julia Reid, Chief Operating Officer, QBANK.
Jayde Cox, Manager – Distribution at QBANK, who was the contact centre manager at the time, explains the reporting problem: “from a contact centre perspective, I was out of the business for a whole three days, because I had to focus on reporting for our board. In addition to that, there was no value provided back to the team and you couldn't coach them because the data was already a month old.”
With its telephony contract approaching renewal, QBANK conducted due diligence on alternative unified communications and contact centre solutions available in the market. Those solutions had to meet QBANK’s obligations as an APRA-regulated financial services organisation, particularly the requirements to keep data within Australia.
QBANK chose RingEX and Contact Centre, a cloud-based integrated unified communications and contact centre platform, which not only complied with APRA’s onshore data retention requirements, but also provided QBANK with the features and high-availability needed for a mission-critical service.
“RingCentral offered us five nines [99.999% availability], which works out to be unscheduled downtime of just over five minutes a year. Whilst a significantly impressive offer in itself, it was also financially backed,” said Paul Stevens, Manager – Technology Operations, QBANK.
“In addition, the new RingCentral solution worked out to be virtually cost neutral compared to our old system. However, RingCentral stood out for the richness of the data we were capturing, the customisation we could do and the ability to manage the system ourselves.”