Avaya, a leader in communications solutions for the healthcare industry announced that Emergencias, an innovative health services provider focused on urgent care, has implemented new Avaya IX Contact Center to accelerate its digital transformation ensuring seamless and flexible communications with users.
Avaya IX Contact Center will also help the company consolidate its communications infrastructure, improve its customer service processes and better position itself in a highly competitive healthcare services market.
Emergencias is a leader in the healthcare and out-of-hospital emergency services sector, which has grown steadily and expanded both at home and abroad. In 2008, it became the first healthcare company in Argentina to receive ISO 9001 certification for its robust processes, and it has been awarded a Premio Mercurio, one of the most prestigious awards in the South American healthcare sector.
The company receives between 10,000 and 14,000 calls every day, roughly 3.5 and 5 million calls per year, handled by a team of 4,000 employees and 5,000 third-party service providers. This tremendous volume of high-stress interactions requires a communication system capable of supporting mission-critical operations 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including medical emergencies occurring at all times of night or day.
Responding to such a large volume of calls while ensuring seamless service represented a major technological obstacle for Emergencias as it had no automated distribution or priority structure in place for its services and VDN’s, making it difficult to calculate call abandonment rates or define metrics for improving performance. This led to suboptimal levels of service and customer satisfaction, disproportionate and unequal staff workloads, and higher cost.
“When we were evaluating potential technology providers, we looked at several brands, including Avaya, Cisco and Genesys, among others,” said Germán Nájera, CTO, Emergencias. “The key difference was that Avaya demonstrated the ability to listen and really ascertain our issues and the user experiences we were trying to achieve in order to understand our business before recommending and implementing the technology. Avaya was fully involved with us through all aspects of our process, and we worked in conjunction with them to reconfigure our communication system.”
Once Avaya IX Contact Center had been implemented, Emergencias quickly began seeing results. One major advantage is the flexibility offered by Avaya’s solution, which has helped the company adapt immediately to sudden increases in demand. It currently assigns between 120 and 140 agents during peak times, helping to automatically cover different service levels as they now have real-time metrics that allow management to take decisions immediately that adapt to real-time conditions and improve service and responsiveness.
“With Avaya our contact centre is much more efficient with the same amount of people, and we have increased the volume of calls we can handle by almost 40 percent. Agent availability is now automatic. Thanks to digital telephony, through a SIP, costs have decreased significantly, and we now have the opportunity to grow and increase the range of services we offer.”
“An open and flexible communications solution that offers automation and real-time analytics plays a critical role in successfully transforming organizations in the healthcare sector,” commented Daniel Sacks, engineering director, Avaya. “In conjunction with the leadership team from Emergencias, we developed a roadmap to optimize the experience of patients and other callers, driving significant improvements to waiting times, reducing the number of lost calls to almost zero, and maximizing agent performance by leveraging a more robust communication solution to drive efficiency and help them grow.”
Another benefit offered by Avaya IX Contact Center is an automatic priority system that classifies calls by segment, customer and service type based on the level of risk involved, helping prioritize the most critical emergencies. It has also helped streamline operations and improve customer service levels, reducing redialing rates from 5 to 1 and call abandonment rates from 30 percent to under 5 percent for emergencies and less than 2 percent for life-threatening situations. “It marked a radical change for our customers in terms of the service we offer, and we have seen much higher satisfaction levels stemming from the fact that we can now answer their calls in four seconds or less,” added Nájera.
About Emergencias
Founded in 1979 in Buenos Aires, Emergencias is the market leader in out-of-hospital medical emergencies for both individual and corporate clients. Its ongoing research and investment in technology have helped position it as a pioneer in software application and technological development to help improve emergency medical resource management and processes within the sector, leading it to receive numerous awards and helping it transcend boundaries.
About Avaya
Businesses are built on the experiences they provide, and every day millions of those experiences are built by Avaya (NYSE: AVYA). For over one hundred years, we’ve enabled organizations around the globe to win – by creating intelligent communications experiences for customers and employees. Avaya builds open, converged and innovative solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration – in the cloud, on-premise or a hybrid of both. To grow your business, we’re committed to innovation, partnership, and a relentless focus on what’s next. We’re the technology company you trust to help you deliver Experiences that Matter. Visit us at www.avaya.com.