Scentre Group
Scentre Group owns and operates the pre-eminent shopping centre portfolio in Australia and New Zealand with retail real estate assets under management valued at $45.7 billion and shopping centre ownership interests valued at $32.3 billion.
With 39 large format shopping centres spread across Australia and New Zealand, Scentre Group manage some of the worlds most visited and operationally intensive parking environments.
The Challenge
With over 525 million visitors per year, Westfield Shopping Centres are often the busiest of shopping precincts in any city. This volume of visitors places significant importance on the smooth operation of their car parks. A single customer enquiry handled inefficiently at a Car Park Exit or Pay Machine can quickly cause a compounded delay for other customers.
Scentre Group were looking for a way to centralize the handling of exceptional events, to provide a more responsive, efficient, and consistent service, resulting in an enhanced customer experience.
The goals of this centralized service included:
- Providing a consistently high Customer Service experience across all their car parks, whilst maintaining a local feel.
- Implementing a more economical service delivery model through centralization.
- Providing better support for onsite Scentre Group staff, freeing them up to focus on higher value interactions with customers.
- Capturing all the reasons for customer friction to enable sophisticated data analytics to inform strategic thinking and initiatives.
- Extending the hours of coverage provided to customers for premium customer service.
Over the years, Scentre Group have invested in various site-based parking technologies, all of which are operated in a siloed manner. Therefore, the technical and operational challenges primarily consisted of;
- Reliably connecting these disparate systems together.
- Integrating these systems in a coherent and consistent manner.
- Embedding Scentre Group’s operational business logic and workflows into a centralized command and control application.
- Delivering an intuitive user interface for the control room operators to provide responsive, efficient and quality customer service.
The Outcome
This project delivered a state-of-the-art National Operations Centre (NOC) for Scentre group, which as of June 2017, services over 120,000 customer calls per month from 16 connected sites (and counting). The customer service improvements generated by Scentre Group’s FLINQ Solution are not only material, they’re also measurable:
- An average 60% reduction in time spent waiting by the customer, resulting in an annual saving of over 149 days of customer wait time.
- An additional 52 hours of premium customer service coverage per week, equating to a 64% uplift.
- On broad base modelling, the solution with all its benefits has achieved a net neutral cost outcome for the business.
From a technology standpoint, the FLINQ Solution has been:
- Reliable and robust, delivering 99.995% availability this year.
- Efficiently scalable, handling over 3.5m events per day from connected sub-systems, without requiring any resource expansion.
The National Operations Centre has enabled Scentre Group to redistribute their labor force in a more productive way. In shifting some of the local staff duties to the National Operations Centre, Scentre Group has:
- Freed up local staff to engage in higher value face-to-face customer interactions; and
- Provided better remote support for local staff to maintain and operate the car park.
The Solution
The FLINQ Solution equips Operators with real-time information, enabling them to make more informed decisions and provide local, situationally aware advice to customers. Prime examples of this include:
On answering a customer call, the Operator is instantly presented with a map of the Car Park highlighting the caller’s position (and relevant Points of Interest), live video feed(s) from the caller’s location and information regarding the site, device, and customer (via an integration with Scentre Group’s Operational Wiki).
Operators maintain a record of customers who have been issued lost tickets via FLINQ. Where a lost ticket event occurs, Operators can quickly look up the customers License Plate and identify any recent interactions with the NOC. This enables Operators to distinguish between genuine lost ticket cases and repeat offenders, enabling them to take the appropriate course of action.
The unified FLINQ experience provides a consistent and intuitive interface for the Operators, removing noise and inefficiencies associated with operating multiple sub-systems from various suppliers and significantly reducing staff training overheads.
SMS captures accurate data associated to all aspects of the call handling process. This has given Scentre Group the ability to analyze and understand the underlying reasons for customer assistance calls. These insights are used to mitigate these from occurring altogether (for example, rectifying faulty equipment, customer education campaigns and increased signage and wayfinding). This translates to a more frictionless experience for their customers and a reduction in demand on the NOC.
Mat Clee
Sr. Business Manager of Scentre Group’s National Parking
“Park Assist (PA) have been an excellent business partner on this project. The FLINQ software solution is extremely flexible and nimble. Critical to the success of the project was PA’s recommendation to break up the project into design and then execution. The disciplined and comprehensive upfront design process – lead by PA and supplemented by the outsource partners – meant there was no expectation gap between the parties and reduced much of the risk around project execution. Not only is the FLINQ solution nimble, but PA themselves demonstrated flexibility throughout the project delivery cycle as the sequencing of site integration works changed. There is little to nothing we would do differently on this Project had we had our time over again – Park Assist have been a proactive and faithful partner.”