The Suncorp Telephony Upgrade program was an enterprise wide initiative and one of the largest in terms of people change and impact across the organisation.

The scope of the program was to deliver two digital platforms (Skype for Business and Genesys) across the Suncorp Group delivering capability to all its’ people independent of their physical location.  Included in the scope was the delivery of a functional and supported call recording platform called Verint.

The program impacted every staff member across the Suncorp Group (~15,000 people) and multiple locations across five countries including Australia, New Zealand, India, China and the Philippines.

The previous Avaya telephony platform presented significant risks and constrained the ability for Suncorp to scale to meet its customers’ needs and prohibited delivery of the Insurance strategy.

The risks of not delivering the program included major and lengthy business interruptions, reputational consequences, unsupported staff in the event of a system failure, impaired ability to integrate other critical applications and impact to the delivery of other current and future projects.

The change impact was considered high due to the scale and complexity of the change, dependencies on other critical applications and services as well as compliance maintenance.

The initial interactive learning approach pivoted to a digital solution due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The new learning concept included self-paced micro modules personalised to user roles and needs.

An expansive network of change champions were sourced from every impacted function to support the program throughout the entire delivery lifecycle.

Delivery of the program was rolled out over a series of migrations and delivered sequentially per stream.

The roll out for the Corporate Telephony stream took place mostly on-site pre-Covid whilst the Contact Centre was rolled out in a fully virtual environment during Covid-19.

The successful delivery and completion of the program has prepared the foundations for future technology, process improvements and other integrated technologies to be considered as viable opportunities.

The program has created a robust and sustainable telephony platform that now better supports Suncorp’s future growth and mitigates the operational risk of the former Avaya platform.

The achievements below are indicative of the magnitude of the change, the hard work and effort of the team, and are the results of a well-executed plan.

Corporate Telephony Onsite rollout pre-Covid	Contact Centre Virtual rollout post-Covid
40 migrations in 10 weeks 6,500 people migrated 270 communications 7,000 phone numbers migrated 70 Trailblazers (Change champions)	18 migrations in 6 months 8,185 people migrated 385 program communications 6,893 phone numbers migrated (AU&NZ) 310 Generati (Change champions)

A change engagement score of 88% indicated our people understood and supported the change and felt confident in operating effectively in the changed environment.

Post implementation, staff sentiment supported the success of the program with feedback received such as:

“Very smooth sailing today – Day 1 working from home using the new telephony upgrade. Great job team! First time using the platform and all the Skype functionality is working for me.”