Australia-Based BPAY Group’s Smart Tech Strategy Puts It Ahead of Remote Work Shift

When it comes to remote working, BPAY Group considers itself lucky. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Australia, the organization powering secure electronic bill payments was able to adjust to remote work incredibly fast.

According to Sean Ollerton, Platform Services Lead at BPAY Group, BPAY Group’s employees were fortunate to already enjoy a flexible work culture; now, Zoom’s unified communications platform has helped completely transform the organisation for a hybrid working world.

Pivoting during lockdown was a relatively light lift, according to Ollerton: “My team was used to having a daily stand-up meeting to catch up on tasks. When we went online, we added an extra 15 minutes and it became more social – a way for us to check in on each other, as well as our projects,” he said. 

“Our VPN and all of our applications, including Zoom, were already available to the full complement of users,” Ollerton added. “I believe a lot of businesses struggled when they suddenly had everyone working remotely and didn’t have the infrastructure to support 100 percent of people being remote. Thankfully, we were already geared up for that.”

Rapid scalability

BPAY Group adapted very quickly when the pandemic closed its offices, having made the inspired decision to unify corporate communications on Zoom in September 2019. At that time, the company was averaging around 500 Zoom meetings a month.

“As soon as we went remote, the number of Zoom calls jumped to around 2,500. And it wasn’t just about meetings. Zoom was quickly adopted for our all-staff sessions, and we used the polls and chat to enable social interactions and connection,” Ollerton said. “It was all about uplifting the ‘work anywhere’ concept. We wanted users to be able to connect in person and be just as productive, whether they were in the office or out of the office.

“And we had some existing tools for that, but they weren’t very user-friendly or reliable. So, when we looked at lifting all of this, it was Zoom that was easy to use – so people were able to pick it up quickly and easily. For example, with some of the other tools that we were almost going to use, we found that people couldn’t join those meetings. But, with Zoom, it was just straight in and away they went.

“It was all about solving that ease of use, and improving our ‘work anywhere’ concept.”

Migrating to Zoom Phone

Ollerton says BPAY Group prides itself on its value of working “better together”, a concept that Zoom has helped them embrace even further. 

“It basically means when we work together, we work better. The other purpose of BPAY Group is to “make life simpler”, especially when we’re talking to our customers. What we try to do for people with our products, we also try to live that internally as well. And that’s how we present things to our users. And so, if it’s not making life simpler for our users, then why are we doing it? And it was something that Zoom fit with,” Ollerton said.

In 2019, BPAY Group implemented Zoom Meetings for video communications, and then a year later, decided to replace the entire phone system with Zoom Phone, solving another challenge around functionality for its remote teams. 

“We’d gone to a digital phone system already. But it was an older system, and it proved to be a challenge when we switched to remote work. Plus it was costly and time-intensive to maintain,” Ollerton said. “So, we looked at replacing that with Zoom. The functionality that we were able to get out of the Zoom phone system not only fixed any integration issues for remote staff, but made it simpler for everybody using it.

“The solution was an all-integrated meetings, video, and chat – and we added phone to give us that extra functionality.”

Unified communications ‘made everything simpler’

From an infrastructure point of view, Sean says being able to consolidate everything in one system makes the entire functionality streamlined and, overall, so much easier. Not to mention considerably less costly to implement and maintain.

“Zoom is our unified communications platform. We use it for 1:1 meetings and team video conferences, and we use it as our phone system. It’s really transformed the way we resource communications across the organisation,” Sean said.

“And, because we weren’t having to introduce another tool for users, it actually enabled us to turn off the old solution. We didn’t have to tell people, ‘Here’s another piece of software that you’ve got to keep an eye on each time.’ It just made everything simple.” 

Using Zoom means BPAY Group has full control of their communications across the organisation, regardless of where people choose to work, along with the ease of managing the back-end infrastructure.

“We have brought all that in-house with our existing resources. Now we’re able to do everything in an easy and more direct way,” Ollerton said.