Allan Sui, Zagame’s CIO, explained that around 2015, the business was incredibly focused on growth – and to have that many different branches and different brands with different sort of people and cultures all working for the same organisation, under the ‘Zagame’ name, was becoming complex. Essentially, Zagame Automotive Group was still a small family-owned business, model wise. But for that many brands and that many different work cultures to come into one place, it just wasn’t really working for customers. Allan explains, “Customers weren’t finding a consistent experience through our dealerships. They go to say, for example, one particular brand’s showroom and they’ll be treated one way. But then there are other minority dealerships, ones that we just recently bought and hadn’t really set up properly yet, they’d go to those places and it’s a completely different Zagame experience.”
It soon came to an obvious point that Zagame needed a central point of content for all customers that could be used to drive the customer experience and maintain a consistent master brand. The business decided that a Customer Contact Centre was needed, but back then they were running separate phone systems at every single dealership on-site and running ISDN lines into each every single one of dealerships separately. They weren’t in a position to implement a Contact Centre in a nice quick way. As with many large-scale implementations, the project needed to be completed yesterday, yet given the current set-up, even the timeframe of several weeks wasn’t feasible. Zagame decided to outsource to an external partner to provide a ‘bolt on’ service; at the time eComms was not yet set up to provide a Contact Centre of the scale required.
“Initially, it worked really fast and really well. But then it didn’t work. We were having phone issues. We’re having line issues. We’re having some sort of nightmare every two weeks. So it wasn’t an ideal situation. So eComms put through a proposal for us with the provision of a new backbone of the business – both phone system wise and also the lines coming into our environment – switching from ISDN to SIP. And that really changed the game for us.” – Allan Sui, CIO
“Throughout the years, the Customer Contact Center has become such a key piece for the business. We all really care about what happens in the Contact Center on a daily basis now” – Allan Sui, CIO
