Soothing the Call Flow for Alfred Health’s Critical Communications Hub

The first point of contact matters

At Alfred Health, the switchboard operator centre is a key point of contact for patients and the community, making sure patients and their families can speak to the relevant departments about their care. The role of the operator in healthcare is complex and often challenging, especially when dealing with emotional and fraught callers. Operators need to deal with emergency situations, responding quickly and have the ability to follow procedures in an efficient and accurate manner, implementing emergency protocols when required.

So, when Alfred’s existing operator and call centre solution slowed product development, it started to have a negative impact on the operator centre customer experience. Finding a replacement with specialised requirements such as a healthcare operator user is very difficult. Alfred Health was happy with the Cisco telephony platform they have in place and is part of their long-term technology stack. Solving the ‘switchboard’ problem was critical. Planning is important in the healthcare industry and ensuring the applications they invest in, needs to have the ability to change and develop new capabilities as new unplanned requirements immerge. Alfred’s needed a simpler more cost-effective way to manage the application across a vast number of user groups with differing requirements within the many different departments in the organisation. It was also a requirement to reduce the ongoing costs of updates and to ensure that these were a far simpler process.

A solution with healthcare in mind

“At Alfred Health we needed an operator centre solution with the healthcare industry in mind. The team at ArchiTech, our solutions partner provider, understood the myriad of challenges the healthcare industry face and match the right technology solution to support our business. In partnership with Voitec and based on our requirements, ArchiTech recommended samwin operator console to replace the existing platform,” said Simon Santoso, telecommunications architect, Alfred Health.

Mark Owens, managing director at Voitec explains “samwin is an enterprise grade operator (attendant) application with the scale, flexibility and feature set to cover existing requirements for Alfred Health, as well as future needs. samwin can operate on the current and future versions of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM), as well as having the ability to run with Webex Calling, Webex Dedicated Instance (DI) and even integrate into some Microsoft 365 applications. samwin is also able to run as a full cloud solution to avoid the need for Alfred Health to manage related infrastructure.”

“At Alfred Health for a solution to work across the organisation, it was important to have the ability to re-configure the user interface in such varied environments like phone users who take only a handful off calls per day, all the way through to a single ‘switchboard’ expert who processors hundreds of calls per day. Having access to time critical information on their screen without having to ‘skip’ between applications was key to a good user experience and ease caller anxieties. Although samwin does use a browser-based UI, Alfred Health chose to use the samwin ‘thick’ client to avoid complications around the configurations and related complexities with supporting that browser on varied user desktops,” said Rob Montgomery, Business Development Manager at ArchiTech Network and Communications Solutions.

The operator centre is a critical communications hub for Alfred Health

The operator centre is critical in Alfred Health’s engagement with patients and the community. With samwin, Alfred Health was not only able to maintain service levels through replicating existing features, but also enhance the customer experience. Having solved other call flow issues that were not able to be dealt with previously. The IT administration team now have a single point of access to be able to update flows, user preferences and reporting. Alfred Health is due to schedule its next CUCM upgrade shortly. The IT team is pleased they will not be required to upgrade the samwin solution. The previous solution had dependencies on the version of CUCM and hence always made the upgrade projects far more costly and complex than it needed to be.

“The samwin operator console has made the experience of contacting Alfred Health, better. Internal Alfred users are happier and able to be able to customise their workspace with little effort and time,” said Simon Santoso, telecommunications architect, Alfred Health.