Helping Illawarra Credit Union innovate their way to a better banking experience

Since its founding in 1972, Illawarra Credit Union has served 25,000+ members across New South Wales, committed to delivering exceptional customer experiences. To modernise their on-premise contact centre, they adopted Amazon Connect—seeking deeper analytics, intent‑based routing, and seamless integrations—but needed expert guidance to truly unlock its potential. That’s where CloudWave stepped in, deploying NEON and CONCIERGE to deliver real‑time insights, secure authentication, and automated workflows that enhance service quality while respecting the stringent compliance standards of financial services.

When Illawarra Credit Union decided to move their on-premise contact centre to the cloud, they chose Amazon Connect as the platform for their contact centre.

While the basic functionality of the platform was a vast improvement on their traditional, on-premise contact centre, they were keen to innovate further to gain Deep, rich analytics, customised dashboards, integration with new data sources such as their core banking system, and end-to-end enhancements of their entire Customer Experience.  Illawarra credit union realised they didn’t possess the in-house expertise to deliver the advanced functionality or agent desktop needed to drive the efficiencies the technology platform was capable of.

It was clear they needed to partner with a service provider with a proven track record of large-scale, tailoer builds in a highly secure environment to deliver on the cloud transition project requirements.  

Given the high levels of compliance needed to operate within the financial services industry, the project presented a number of industry niche requirements in order to meet the necessary specifications.

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Major pain points prior to implementation:

•    A lack of visibility on contact centre performance due to poor reporting
•    Inability to route calls based on customer intent, leading to low first call resolution and inefficient call handling processes
•    Manual and inconsistent caller identification and authentication process
•    Limited self-service and no automation
•    No call segmentation or skills based approach leading to long and inefficient agent onboarding
•    Agents working across multiple interfaces and systems

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CloudWave implemented NEON and CONCIERGE contact centre products, deployed as a managed service.  The solution enabled Illawarra Credit Union to;

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• Capture customer intent on every call with CONCIEGRE product
• Automate high volume, low-value interactions to existing digital or lower cost channels
• Move their operational processes, including agent onboarding to an intent-based model, improving onboarding times and customer outcomes
• Introduced Identification on every call by leveraging business information in the NEON agent workspace.
• Use NEON QuickSight reports for real-time and historical reporting to improve forecasting and intra-day management
• Leverage CloudWave’s Control Tower service to improve security

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With their new CloudWave solution Illawarra has seen the below benefits.

• Full visibility of both real time data and historical data on their contact centre interactions, enabling their managers to be empowered to improve customer outcomes.
• Has the ability to act on insights, without needing to talk to IT by using CloudWave’s self-service, no code management portals in CONCIERGE and NEON.
• Know what all callers want (their intent), before agents answer the phone, saving time and improving customer experience
• Can identify all callers before agents answer the phone, enabling a personalised experience and reduced handling time
• The intent model allows new staff to be available for calls earlier, enhancing customer and agent experience
• The ability to automate and deflect intent by further configuration within CONCIERGE
• Have contact centre experts on-hand to work through a systematic service improvement plan to ensure.

Illawarra Credit Union continue to fulfil their promise of investing in better products and services. The next phase of this project will see the implementation of CloudWave CONCIERGE and ID presentation which will provide intent of call information to intelligently deflect interactions to the most efficient ICU service or person providing a much better end-to-end customer experience.

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