The Good Meal Co serves up an AI-powered voice and CCaaS solution

Established in 1997, The Good Meal Co is focused on spreading the joy of food across Australia. With manufacturing facilities in Sydney, the company boasts a market-leading menu of frozen meals coupled with a range of soups and desserts.

A subsidiary of Australian global agribusiness SPC, The Good Meal Co team services Retail, Wholesale, and Direct-to-Consumer markets. Additionally, the company takes pride in delivering ready-to-heat meals for older adults and individuals with disabilities who receive NDIS* and Home Care Package** subsidies from the Australian government.

A bottleneck in customer service operations

The Good Meal Co caters to a wide range of customers, including elderly individuals and people with disabilities who may encounter difficulties when placing orders online. As a result, 40 percent of orders are received through the company’s website, while 60 percent are received over the phone.

To ensure an exceptional customer experience, The Good Meal Co is dedicated to facilitating order placement through the most convenient channel for each customer. However, the company’s existing contact center posed a significant challenge. The high volume of calls and limited customer self-service options created a bottleneck in operations.

Additionally, the infrastructure provided by its previous legacy telephony provider hindered the collection and analysis of customer data, further exacerbating the problem. As a result, The Good Meal Co team faced difficulties in identifying and resolving the underlying challenges they were experiencing.

With the contact center team’s productivity being hindered by manual work, extensive paperwork, and administrative tasks, the company determined it needed a new platform.

The requirements for the ideal platform included scalability to meet growth, as well as force multiplier capabilities, and the ability to deliver more efficient workflows. With the core issues identified, The Good Meal Co team began exploring cloud providers to modernize the company’s infrastructure.

Seamless migration to a new CCaaS

After researching several solutions, The Good Meal Co team decided on a solution from Local Measure, a leading CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) and advanced voice solutions provider integrated with Amazon Connect, AWS’s AI-powered contact center solution.

Since then, Local Measure has been acquired by Zendesk with the offering name changed to Zendesk Contact Center. The built-in integration with AWS Connect unifies digital and voice channels within a single intelligent platform, delivering scalable, secure, and flexible AI-powered voice and CCaaS solutions.

The migration process proceeded smoothly, with the team collaborating on several technical aspects of the implementation, including mapping out the entire business process flow. Additionally, the agents at The Good Meal Co were provided with a comprehensive step-by-step user guide, and the entire training process was seamless and well-received.

Before the agent training sessions, team leaders conducted a demo of the new CCaaS tool to generate excitement about the upcoming changes. Agents were assured that these changes would make their lives easier, and they were enthusiastic and ready to embrace the training.

The end-to-end project, from The Good Meal Co’s solution selection and migration process, all the way through to taking the first production phone call, took a mere five weeks.

Personalized service and stronger customer relationships

Agents have reported increased job satisfaction and improved performance since adopting Zendesk Contact Center. They can now easily access past customer interactions in real-time and gain a better understanding of customer history, which allows them to provide more personalized service. As a result, agents have built stronger relationships with customers, especially those who simply want to have a conversation and connect with someone.

The platform also provides better analytics, which enables supervisors to pinpoint areas of improvement. Managers can now analyze metrics such as abandoned calls, average wait time, call duration, and after-call work time, which allows them to make continuous adjustments and optimize operations. The team can also track resolution codes to understand how customer inquiries are being resolved. These improvements provide a much clearer overall picture of the customer experience.

In addition, Zendesk Contact Center has provided performance benefits such as faster deployment times for prompt updates. Previously, changing voice prompts required manual recording, which was time-consuming and often resulted in poor audio quality. Now, supervisors can easily update and publish prompts across all channels. The time it takes to make these changes is significantly reduced.

Overall, agents have been able to handle more calls, which is a positive outcome. However, it is still crucial for them to find the balance between being empathetic and focusing on sales, as The Good Meal Co’s ultimate goal is to build customer loyalty and higher satisfaction scores.

‍*The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is a program the Australian government runs to fund people with disabilities for their specific needs.

**A home care package is where a home care provider receives funding from the government.

As a service provider for both of these subsidies, The Good Meal Co doesn’t bill the customer directly. The customer pays a minimal upfront payment, such as five dollars for 20 meals.