Southern Cross Credit Union Boosts Customer Engagement with Vonage Fusion

Vonage Fusion, a unified communications and contact center solution, integrated with Salesforce Service Cloud, enhances both customer engagement and agent experience

HOLMDEL, N.J., Feb. 7, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Vonage, a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation and a part of Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC), has been chosen by Southern Cross Credit Union (SCCU), a community-based organization committed to its purpose of supporting customers through their financial life stages. With Vonage Fusion, a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution, SCCU is leveraging a common, flexible platform where these solutions can work in harmony across various departments and to scale up or down as needed.

Located in New South Wales, Australia, SCCU's customer-led strategy means that people and conversations are at the center of everything the company does. The organization has been heavily investing in more streamlined digital solutions, choosing Vonage Fusion to better support customers across Australia and to continue expanding its reach without compromising on quality of service. And, by leveraging its existing investment in Salesforce, coupling Vonage Fusion's contact center capabilities with deep integration into Service Cloud, SCCU is driving engagement for both employees and customers at every touchpoint.

"Over the past few years, we have experienced significant growth as a credit union, but, like everyone else, we were forced to adjust the way we do business when the pandemic hit. Consequently, our call center became a much bigger focus. Our customers were accustomed to personalized service, so without the possibility of face-to-face contact, they were reaching out to tell us they needed other options," explains Tara Armbruster, Customer Service Centre Manager, SCCU. "We already had Salesforce as our CRM platform, but we knew that what we had been doing just wasn't working any longer."

Through Vonage Fusion, customers get access to industry-acclaimed and award-winning UCaaS and CCaaS solutions that are deeply integrated with today's business productivity tools to drive business growth and improve work efficiency among employees. This allows customers to tap into the most diversified portfolio of communication technologies to further differentiate and accommodate the changing needs of the business. According to a recent study by Frost & Sullivan, over 95% of businesses recognize that tightly integrating UCaaS and CCaaS applications is important for their organization.* Vonage Fusion is the perfect choice for businesses wanting to become more agile, build differentiation and accelerate customer loyalty to create seamless and personalized employee and customer experiences through a single solution.

Continued Armbruster, "With Vonage Fusion, and the ability to seamlessly integrate its contact center with Salesforce Service Cloud, our team has access to a dynamic dashboard across a single pane of glass to see what is happening with each customer. When a call comes in, we know exactly who that person is, so we can pull up their data before even saying hello and we feel like we are one step ahead. The platform gives us control over what we want to see from front office and back office, all in one place."

Businesses like SCCU that are entering the next phase of digital transformation are seeing the value and benefit in the convergence of their unified communications and contact center solutions. With Vonage Fusion's seamless integration of the two solutions, SCCU is able to meet the evolving needs of employees to connect and collaborate, while maintaining deep engagement with customers. In addition, working with a single provider for all their internal and external communication needs enables SCCU to become more agile while lowering their operational costs.

"With solutions like Vonage Fusion, we are helping customers of all sizes build seamless and personalized employee and customer engagement through complementary communications solutions," said Ron Maayan, SVP Product Management for Vonage. "We are thrilled to work with innovative businesses like SCCU to create exceptional employee and customer experiences in a world where digital engagement is on the rise, and effective communication with customers and collaboration among team members are both essential for success."

"Customer experience continues to be a critical, strategic driver of success for businesses today," said Nancy Jamison, Senior Industry Director, Frost & Sullivan. "This is creating an amplified need for agility, transparency and seamless communication across the business for organizations. By unifying both front office and back office - the convergence of UCaaS and CCaaS solutions - all employees become integral to the customer experience, making it easier to build the kind of engagement that helps businesses stand out in a crowded and competitive landscape. Providers that make this integration easy by offering a single solution and one point of contact for these services are leading the next generation of collaboration in the tech space."

In addition to deep and seamless integration with today's leading business productivity tools, Vonage Fusion includes:

• A desktop and mobile app to enable a work from anywhere experience for employees
• Vonage Meetings video conferencing solution, embedded directly within the application
• Easy-to-implement and manage omnichannel features that enable agents to connect with customers easily and wherever they are most comfortable - voice, video, messaging, chat, and more
• More than 50 features and apps, such as Simultaneous Ring, Auto Attendant, AI Virtual Assistant, Business Call Recording, Virtual Extension, and many more to empower users to work from home, the office, or on-the-go
• An App Center to easily obtain add-ons and integration into high-value CRM and business applications

Read the full case study to find out more about how SCCU is leveraging Vonage Fusion to transform how businesses communicate and operate from the office or anywhere, providing enormous flexibility, ensuring business continuity and enhancing customer engagement.

Salesforce, Service Cloud and others are among the trademarks of salesforce.com, inc.

* Merging Skies: Integrating UCaaS and CCaaS. Frost & Sullivan. December 2023.

About Vonage
Vonage, a global cloud communications leader, helps businesses accelerate their digital transformation. Vonage's Communications Platform is fully programmable and allows for the integration of Video, Voice, Chat, Messaging, AI and Verification into existing products, workflows and systems. The Vonage conversational commerce application enables businesses to create AI-powered omnichannel experiences that boost sales and increase customer satisfaction. Vonage's fully programmable unified communications, contact center and conversational commerce applications are built from the Vonage platform and enable companies to transform how they communicate and operate from the office or remotely - providing the flexibility required to create meaningful engagements.

Vonage is headquartered in New Jersey, with offices throughout the United States, Europe, Israel and Asia and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC), and a business area within the Ericsson Group called Business Area Global Communications Platform. To follow Vonage on X (formerly known as Twitter), please visit twitter.com/vonage. To follow on LinkedIn, visit linkedin.com/company/Vonage/. To become a fan on Facebook, go to facebook.com/vonage. To subscribe on YouTube, visit youtube.com/vonage.

SOURCE Vonage