Voitec’s Brad Whyte talks with Thom Chrystiuk at Eastern Plant Hire (EPH) about business continuity, while still focusing on providing ‘the best service on earth’. Formed in 1996, EPH had a vision, to innovate the earthmoving equipment hire industry and to be Australia’s premier plant hire agency. With operations across three of Australia’s largest cities Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, the customer experience is still at its heart.
Brad: Thom, I must admit 2020 is not the year any of us expected. Business continuity has been top of mind for most businesses and how to ensure they continue to provide the right level of service and customer experience. EPH is a very customer centric business, what challenges have you faced to ensure you meet the service levels your customers are used to?
Thom: This year has certainly changed the way business needs to react and respond to market conditions. At EPH, we had to look at how can we work effectively – the customer service centre is a team of 15 people across 3 office locations. Suddenly, the team needed to work remotely from home without impacting the business. On top of this, the additional challenge we faced was an incumbent old and cumbersome telephony system which we need to replace.
Brad: How has the team dealt with operating differently?
Thom: The management team realised we needed to streamline, simply, reduce costs and leverage technology. We worked with Star21, a Telstra platinum partner, who understood our challenges. We were able to resolve most of our issues in the Microsoft Teams solution using Telstra Calling 365. What Teams is not able to provide is contact centre capability. Our needs are by no means complex, and we are not a large contact centre. However, being able to queue calls based on agent skills, have our customers being played simple wait greetings depending on the queue they have come in on, log in and out of queues, see live wallboards with incoming call traffic, be able to run detailed reports, integrate with our in place CRM systems were all things we needed. Voitec’s CX CLOUD® was able to provide these capabilities.
Working with Star21, they realised customer excellence is core to our business and packaged a solution right for our needs. Voitec’s CX CLOUD® was the perfect fit to compliment Microsoft Teams and Telstra Calling 365 to provide EPH with the right customer contact centre technology. Now we have a complete solution.
About Eastern Plant Hire (EPH): a specialist agency, totally dedicated to providing a wide range of earthmoving equipment throughout Australia; servicing domestic and commercial construction as well as projects in the civil construction industry.
About Star21: Recently, Telstra Platinum partner, Star21 was awarded Telstra Enterprise Partner of the Year, 2020. Focused on helping businesses thrive, Star21 is a team of communication and IT consultants, designers and support team delivering business enabling solutions to empower your business.