We caught up with René Kruse to get an update on how TSYS successfully transformed its managed services business during the pandemic, and how its future contact centre model is creating new opportunities for banking and payment services in Germany.
Although you’ve been delivering payment services to the German market for many years, you’ve hit a new milestone this year. Can you tell us about it?
Yes, we’ve extended our TSYS Managed Services footprint to include a contact centre in Germany, operating out of Hamburg. It’s an exciting milestone for us, as it allows us to bring our business processing outsourcing expertise in areas such as fraud and risk mitigation, card centre customer care and back-office support services, closer to our DACH issuing clients. It also moves us closer to a larger native speaking resource pool combined with client brand knowledge and TSYS’ global best practices.
And what makes the timing special for you, and the market?
The market dynamics for customer service in the DACH region recently hit an inflection point; intuitive digital self-service, which is now an expectation across demographics, driven by the digital adoption that the pandemic accelerated. But our clients still want to provide the option for voice response and customer engagement for certain critical moments in their customer journeys. This market dynamic dovetails with the massive investments we have realised in launching our new managed services proposition based on a scalable, future contact centre model, called TSYS SmartCXSM , which is our new centrally-hosted next generation contact centre platform. Designed with a modern architecture, unified communications technology, and omnichannel and smart automation, our proprietary SmartCX platform seamlessly integrates with TSYS’ core payment processing and value-added services to power end-to-end customer insights and set new benchmarks in customer experience.
During the pandemic, we’ve witnessed an acceleration of the digital transformation strategies of financial institutions in Germany, and around the globe. Can the services you offer directly contribute to financial institutions meeting their strategic digitalisation milestones, and positively impact a brand’s customer experience?
Absolutely, our client experience and their end-customer experience is of key importance.
As a leading global fintech, our ethos is to lead with next generation technologies that deliver tangible results to our clients’ business and their customers. In managed services, our significant investment in robotic process automation, integrated artificial intelligence, and smart interactive voice response technologies — combined with analytics — will work to drive faster and more rewarding customer engagements. And through our set-up, we’re able to service customers 24 x 7 with short response times or callback assist technologies to avoid call abandonment. We will also track the customer journey from the initial engagement touchpoint — such as a website or through social media — to the human agent with all previous interaction digitally packaged to immediately fastrack our agents’ customer knowledge. The outcome? Nothing less than the most robust omni-channel customer experience.
Alongside the continued investment in our contact centre digital technologies, our roadmap of expanding issuer payment services also serves to boost our customer brands. For example, a client utilising our PCI-compliant payment processing services could also leverage our latest next-gen fraud management solutions and service expertise across fraud strategy and consulting, fraud detection and investigation. But the benefits aren’t confined to fraud. They span the payments lifecycle — from risk management to credit services through collections, disputes and chargebacks — all to differentiate their brand and help reinforce their ‘trusted’ expert positioning.
In this way, our managed services can amplify our client’s digital enablement efforts, and our skilled agents can perform as brand ambassadors and as a seamless extension of our clients’ business.
Finally, if there is one thing that we learned from the last two years, it’s to expect the unexpected. What have you done to help future-proof your services by ensuring service continuity in times of crisis, and continued agility for growth and innovation?
Experience and expertise matters. As an enterprise, we run contact centres far and wide, from the UK to the Philippines. Our mantra of keeping people at the heart of our business model, when coupled with our proven track record of good decisioning and technology investments, has been key to our clients’ success in delivering superior customer experiences. This was recently recognised at The Card and Payments Awards 2022 where we received the prestigious ’Best Customer Service’ award.
This special recognition was inspired by the extent of our resilience and service continuity demonstrated during the pandemic, when we reimagined our EMEA call centre operating model, merging secure remote access technology for work-from-home flexibility with dramatic reconfigurations and safety enhancements to our office spaces. This kept our team members safe and our clients’ customers reassured during unprecedented times. We worked with a wide set of stakeholders, from local city councils to police departments and health services, to support our coordinated response and set up a fully functional overflow contact centre model in 3 weeks.
During the pandemic, we also experienced a near doubling in chargeback volumes. Despite this spike — and the continued need to process chargebacks within the schemes’ 90 day timeframes, not one of our clients faced payment due to expiration. Furthermore, our speed-of-answer did not vary. This was in part thanks to our implementation of robotic process automation (RPA) for repetitive back-office activities, not only for chargebacks and disputes, but also lost and stolen and claims. An added benefit of leveraging RPA is that by using software that mimics the actions of humans, tasks have been completed more accurately and with clearer regulatory adherence. This means agents can better focus on the moments-of-truth, driving the best customer experience with greater quality and reduced errors.
We are thrilled that with the opening of our managed services contact centre in Hamburg, we are able to extend this stability, availability and scalability to the German market. We also support further growth with new payment services that we offer alongside, or outside, our payment processing offering. From innovative machine learning-based fraud solutions to our data and analytics platform and beyond, we’re here to help empower agents to be smart brand ambassadors for our clients and deliver award-winning customer experiences.
Read more about Rene Kruse from TSYS, a payments solutions provider on the worldwide stage here.
