Case Study: Deaf Connect Solves Outages With Sequence Shift

Deaf Connect is the largest whole of life service provider in Australia, providing a multitude of services for people in the deaf, blind and hard of hearing communities.

Raising funds through lottery ticket sales seven times a year, their phones run off the hook and payments need to be taken in a fast, safe and secure manner.

After reaching out to peers in the industry for their recommendations, Head of Operations, Marketing and Sales, Paul Stockwell, contacted the SequenceShift team to see if their PCI compliance service could be customized to suit their needs and integrate successfully with a number of service providers being used in their operation.

Challenges

Deaf Connect were using a lottery ticketing system from an inhouse product built for them many years ago, and were looking to move to software as a service for both ticketing and customer management.

Integration with their previous provider was a hurdle, phone lines would shut down once a month with Deaf Connect mediating between their service providers to find a solution.

The complexity of their set-up made this an onerous task, and the regularity of the outages affected staff morale across the board.

The negative effects from their previous provider were profound and the organization’s time, money and reputation were at stake.

During what Stockwell refers to as “very rough times”, many valuable sales calls were unable to get through and many callers were unable to have their payments processed when they did finally get on to an agent.

Solution

Thankfully, the well-established and sophisticated SequenceShift system means those days are over, and what was once a major, recurring issue for the Deaf Connect team is now a long-forgotten memory, with zero outages since the solution was implemented.

From Stockwell, “Essentially, SequenceShift provides a PCI DSS service for over-the-phone payments, securely returning those credit card details back to the eWay payment gateway to process our customers’ credit card transactions.

There was some time we had to invest upfront to see if it would be compatible with our system, and SequenceShift gave us 3 or 4 different options for implementing the same product and we spent some time with our other service providers to see which option would work best.

Because of the time they spent on developing the system architecture, if there is ever an issue it only affects one part of the system and is almost immediately resolved; there’s not even enough time for the contact centre manager to tell me there was a problem in the first place!

Reviewed by: Jo Robinson