Contact Centre
Behind the scenes at AustralianSuper: outsourcing, service channel trends and GenAI
With more than 3.4 million members, AustralianSuper is Australia’s largest super fund. In this interview, we go behind the scenes with Emily Bayford (Senior Manager, Contact Centre Channel) to discuss outsourcing partnerships, Gen AI adoption and channel trends.
The superannuation sector relies heavily on outsourcing for contact centre and back office functions. What are the most critical factors in making an outsource partnership work?
The most critical factors for me in making an outsource partnership work are: Trust, Visibility, Communication, Shared Priorities and Insights.
A great vendor client relationship requires great two-way communication, transparency, information sharing and visibility of operations and plans on both sides. This builds trust, which is foundational, and allows the parties to align their plans and truly support each other. When the parties align their priorities and work toward a common goal, a true partnership is built.
The last item – insights – is something I think most BPOs don’t do well enough. The vendor that creates vehicles to capture and report customer insights positions themselves as an expert on the customer, and a source of invaluable data that the client can feed into improvement plans, product design, platform development and marketing. Clients want to know what their customers are saying and BPOs can tell you how quickly they answered the phone, but not enough of what happened after that.
What trends are you seeing in terms of the channels your members want to engage through?
Over the last two years, we have seen call volumes decrease year on year. At the same time our Messaging volume continues to grow. This is not so much a channel shift, as it is a shift to self-service. As our digital assets and our communications to members get better and better, our members can do what they need to with self-service and have less need to call us to complete transactions or obtain information. We do still see that voice is the predominant contact method, and the preferred channel for complex or emotional interactions.
How is AustralianSuper incorporating Generative AI in the provision of member services?
When we look at AI in member services it is about how we can best support our agents and how we can improve efficiency, so we are looking at Generative AI for things like agent support, sentiment analysis and call routing.
To date, we’ve used it for real time call transcripts, to summarise information to provide blog posts in our knowledge repository, and in a recent use case we utilised AI to identify the questions agents were asking in our support chat. We then used that information to build out our knowledge base further, ensuring that we keep updating our knowledge base with the information our agents need.
Which KPIs do you keep the closest eye on and why?
The KPIs we keep the closest eye on are CSAT, Ease, Resolution, Grade of Service, Abandon rate and Average Handle Time (AHT).
We have done a lot of work over the last couple of years to embed a member-centric culture within our contact centre. We brought customer experience into focus through bringing Voice of Customer scores and verbatims into team meetings, coaching, internal communications and reporting. Our customer experience metrics are just as important as our traditional contact centre metrics and this has had a huge impact on our customer scores and feedback.
What are your top priorities in 2025?
Our priorities are completing our transition to a new contact centre vendor and ensuring that our member services are best practice in every sense. AustralianSuper has made service one of our top priorities for the next few years, and a lot of changes are happening across our frontline teams to ensure we provide our members with exceptional service experiences. We are building new systems and platforms, we have in-sourced some functions and we have embarked on the transition of our contact centre. That will keep us busy for quite a while!
