Shine Lawyers is an Australian success story. Founded in 1976 and specialising in personal injury and compensation, they’ve represented thousands of people in major class action lawsuits. In 2013, they became one of the first law firms to list on the Australian Stock Exchange, and today they are one Australia’s largest litigation law firms. With more than 1,000 employees and 44 offices across Australia and New Zealand, Shine’s client list is extensive and its reach substantial.
As you would expect for a law firm of its size, Shine’s contact centre receives a high volume of enquiries. Clients with questions about their own legal situation, and some wanting answers about whether they can join a class action - but ultimately everyone who gets in touch wants to know whether Shine can help them with their problems. The contact centre team consists of around 50 customer service agents, all working remotely to manage calls, emails, chats and social media queries.
Until recently the contact centre was operating on a legacy system that was no longer effective or sustainable.
The Shine Lawyers team was finding that their old system wasn’t stable and didn’t give us much visibility. “The reporting was a problem, and we couldn’t do any agent scheduling.”
In 2023, Shine partnered with Datacom to roll out Genesys Cloud CX, and the improvements were immediate and dramatic. Datacom’s extensive experience deploying cloud technology for contact centres to achieve improved efficiency, significantly enhance the agent experience and increase customer satisfaction.
As soon as it was introduced, Genesys Cloud CX enabled Shine to bring its Australian and New Zealand teams under one contact centre, providing instant cost efficiencies. The scalability of the system is another major benefit as it allows for better distribution of calls across agents regardless of where they are located, as well as queue visibility and improved reporting.
The team now has a “very good picture of scheduling for our Agents and a far more accurate reflection of agents’ hours”. The upshot? It is saving the team a lot of time and reducing manual data entry.
The callback feature has also been a gamechanger. Callers can choose to keep their place in the queue and arrange a call back, rather than waiting on hold. The callback feature has led to much lower abandonment rates and a nicer client experience because callers are less frustrated when they get to speak to an agent without being put on hold or enduring a long wait.
The Shine Lawyers team can also turn on automatic callback if there is a big spike in calls, which often happens when a class action announcement is made.
“This gives us a much better way of managing peaks and troughs.”
Before 2020, all Shine agents worked from a single location. Now, with agents working remotely from home, Shine is attracting a wider range of job applicants drawn in by the flexibility they offer. For example, parents of young children who want part-time hours that fit around preschool, and people with disabilities who can’t necessarily commute to an office every day. The variable hours also provide coverage for more time zones.
“With new people coming on, the ease of training new people in the system is great. This has been a good investment and a positive change – it’s nice to see the innovation coming through the industry.”
Shine has also worked with Datacom to integrate Genesys Cloud CX with its Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) software, enabling "everything to be on one screen”.
“That enables us to track callers, save a lot of time and data entry for our operators, and create even better customer experiences.”
Future innovations include looking at opportunities to segregate calls more effectively by type, so that each call can be funneled to an agent with specialty knowledge in that area. Chatbots are also on the list for consideration, particularly as a potential option to deal with many of the social media enquiries that the team receives.
The relationship between Datacom and the Shine has been a fruitful one with the team appreciating the way Datacom supports the team to manage changes independently inhouse, rather than having to rely on Datacom each time. This upskills the team and provides ongoing time and cost savings.
For example, the inhouse team can quickly set up new queues or turn its interactive voice recognition (IVR) on and off at any time, without going through Datacom to get it done.
“Datacom has delivered what we need so we can look after our customers and improve their experience when they get in touch with us.”
