Why does Cricket Australia say Dialpad is “in a class of its own?"

Australia’s cricket team is renowned for being one of the oldest and most storied teams in the history of cricket. And Cricket Australia is the national governing body for all cricket state and territory associations throughout Australia.

It’s a big job, one that requires a lot of talking with fans, members and various stakeholders.

Not only were there recurring outages with its telecom infrastructure, it was also notoriously difficult to manage—even setting up call routing was a struggle. On top of that, it also limited how many phone channels the company could have at once and had limited flexibility. This meant that during off-seasons, Cricket Australia still had to pay for the maximum number of seats just to hold on to them for times when they’d have more callers.

And when there were multiple callers trying to renew their memberships or buy tickets, they couldn’t easily bring in more agents to handle the call overflow. Each season, over 6,000 cricket fans call in to renew their memberships, in addition to callers asking about information on matches, booking into event hospitality, inquiring about vaccine requirements and more.

Peak renewal periods can see up to 80% of their total annual calls occur within an eight to 12 week period, which can result in significant call queues and on hold times.

Eventually, Cricket Australia reached the end of its contract, and it was time to find a new communications provider. And Murray Newham, Senior Manager of Cloud Platforms at Cricket Australia, knew exactly what he wanted.

Scalability, integrations, and calls from anywhere

Cricket Australia uses Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365, so they wanted a solution that could integrate with them—Dialpad has integrations for both. And while a browser-based platform was convenient, the team also wanted the option of a desktop app to work from. Dialpad can do both—along with a mobile app that works across iOS and Android.

As for the scalability issues? Dialpad makes it so easy to add and remove seats that they can get more agents ready to go in an instant.

That’s something that’s especially useful for John from the South Australian Cricket Association:

There have been instances when Cricket Australia had to increase its contact center seats by as much as 25 percent, which they just couldn’t do as easily with their previous provider. With Dialpad, they can do it on their own in minutes—without needing to wait for a new contract renewal.

“A class of its own”

Now, the team at Cricket Australia has an easy-to-use communications platform that allows them to keep fans happy and the phone lines clear—while getting a better understanding of each call with features like Dialpad’s real-time transcription:

And while Murray did look at competitors’ solutions, he found that they either lacked what Dialpad offered or provided it only as an add-on that had to be purchased separately. With Dialpad, everything is included upfront and integrated as part of the platform.

“The interface is very modern, and the features—like sentiment analysis, AI, and transcription—that are built into the product are very cool,” says Murray. “The fact that those features are fully integrated is a real standout. Dialpad’s really in a class of its own.”

Analytics made easy

Pre-Dialpad, getting analytics was a frustrating and time-consuming process. The agents would have to download CSV files and sort through the data to convert it into reports, charts, and graphs. Now? Dialpad does that all for them, right from the app.

One particularly helpful feature is the heat maps, which provides a visual representation of call volume. John, a Membership Systems Analyst at the South Australian Cricket Association, uses the heat map to check weekly membership sales and see how it relates to call activity, and to see if a new email campaign has resulted in more callers:

Of course, not all calls are about the same thing, but it’s easy to divide those by category as well. Whether members are calling about renewals, looking for information on upcoming matches, or anything else, the data is all there. “The reporting has been quite useful,” says John. “We get so many analytics around calls, volumes, agent handling, and service level KPIs with Dialpad.”

Where Cricket Australia once had to deal with outages and a lack of scalability, they now have continual uptime and the ability to scale with demand (not to mention neat new features like Dialpad Ai). Dialpad’s integration within Australian Cricket will ensure optimum call service to fans and members for this season and beyond.