Since its launch in 2012, Prospa has grown to become the number one online lender for small businesses in Australia. It has over $5 billion in loans and more than 50,000 borrowers and it’s been recognised with an impressive array of awards for its lending products and services.
One of the keys to Prospa’s success has been its outstanding customer service, including its busy customer call centre, available to support its small business customers across time zones from New Zealand to Western Australia.
As Executive General Manager Operations, Margot Birbeck leads a high-performing team responsible for thousands of customer interactions daily. Under Birbeck’s leadership the focus is on ensuring every conversation builds trust and delivers rapid, effective support, reinforcing Prospa’s reputation for operational excellence and customer-centricity.
“Our operations team has thousands of conversations a day with our customers. Those conversations build trust fast – and in our world, speed matters. We need to be able to help our customers when they need it and connect to people as effectively as possible.”
With such a busy contact centre, the team at Prospa knew their telephony systems had some gaps and inefficiencies, and while they were living with those, they knew there was room for improvement. The timing hadn’t been right in the past, but a recent full platform migration and Salesforce upgrade was the perfect opportunity.
Prospa went to market looking for a new telephony solution to integrate into their new cloud-based system, ultimately selecting Datacom and Genesys.
“Datacom has extensive experience with their own call centre and their customers’ call centres,” says Birbeck. “We’re a small business lender, not telephony experts, so it was great having a partner who could implement best practice. It meant there was no long learning curve.”
Switching to a new telephony solution is nerve-wracking, because there is no gradual way to do it. But with the right preparation and support, Prospa’s migration went without a hitch.
“It went really well,” says Birbeck. “I’ve done many technical projects and I thought it was impossible that it could all go well. There’s always something that will pop up. But this was very smooth. The Datacom team was on site and we made it a fun switchover day, with prizes, cookies shaped like phones, balloons – we wanted to make it a celebration.”
Daniel Khoury, Datacom’s Associate Director of Strategic Customer Success, says the team’s focus was on ensuring the implementation delivered real results without disrupting operations.
“With Prospa, our focus was on delivering a seamless telephony integration that aligned with their vision for customer service and also ensuring the implementation didn't disrupt their team and operations. By bringing together our deep experience in contact centre transformation and our commitment to practical, people-first solutions, we were able to help Prospa unlock real, measurable improvements from day one.”
Where the previous telephony system was effectively a bolt-on for Prospa’s CRM, Genesys and Salesforce deliver a fully integrated experience. Telephony is embedded in each agent’s screen and data flows seamlessly between the two, providing customer information that allows agents to provide a more personalised service.
"Prospa embedded Genesys Cloud into Salesforce to put telephony and customer context on the same screen. That simple change removed manual dialling and reduced dropped calls — so customers spend less time on hold and more time getting the help they need. With dynamic outbound dialling, website enquiries now route to the next available specialist within minutes, turning intent into live conversations fast,” says Birbeck.
The improvements were immediate for the Prospa team, with massive reductions in disruption and inefficiencies across their telephony. Leaders have reported how much they enjoy the improved visibility over calls, with a granular degree of insight into blockages, dropped calls and call flows. For people calling into Prospa, hold times reduced and callback times were also shorter.
The next step for Prospa was enabling dynamic outbound dialler capability, to enable the business to make campaigns more efficient and effective.
“Now, our team spends more time speaking to customers and less time going through lists to find numbers and then getting voicemail,” says Birbeck.
“We’ve taken out that low-value time. Now customers can come to the website, make an enquiry and the system will push it dynamically to telephony so whoever is available can connect within minutes. Speed is our biggest differentiator and a mark of quality, and the outbound dialler supercharges that.”
“Automation will replace manual outbound campaign dialling,” says Birbeck. “It has aligned our call centre to match customer patterns. We really had a vision and we’re realising it now: knowing when and how our customers need us. This has taken our capabilities to the next level.”
“We can now confidently and consistently deliver 80%+ service levels to our customers.”
As a fintech company, the Prospa team is always looking for solutions that can optimise operations and boost performance. There are still some Genesys capabilities that Prospa is yet to tap into, as well as other areas for potential improvement.
“We’re now looking at other aspects in addition to the dialler and we’re planning to leverage Datacom’s best practice around employee experience management, further schedule optimisation and capacity planning,” says Birbeck. “We want to keep on seeing how we can explore and what we can learn.”
Birbeck says that the Datacom team has been a valuable source of expertise and advice. She says the extra personal touches really made the difference. This included providing prizes for the go-live celebration event and a trip for the Prospa team to Adelaide, where they toured a Datacom contact centre to see the Genesys telephony system in action.
“We just love working with Datacom. They can make recommendations based on how they run their contact centres or what other clients have done, which means we get directed to the answers we need much, much quicker. They’re a great company and a great fit.”
Khoury says the success of the project was also a testament to Prospa’s strong customer focus and collaborative approach.
“The Prospa team brought incredible clarity and energy to this project. Their unwavering focus on delivering the best possible experience for their customers — and for their own people — made them a fantastic partner. They knew what they wanted to achieve and they were fully committed to getting the right solution in place. That kind of alignment is what makes projects like this not just successful, but genuinely transformative.”
With Datacom’s experience-technology approach, integrating cloud telephony and automation, Prospa has modernised its customer service with faster, more personalised interactions. The upgrade, delivered with Genesys and seamlessly integrated into Salesforce, has reduced inefficiencies, improved call visibility and enabled dynamic outbound dialling. Ongoing collaboration with Datacom continues to help Prospa optimise operations and explore new enhancements, to create seamless and personalised work experiences – every time.
