Avaya Takes Care of the Health of Communications at Emergencias

40 Years Leading the Extra-Hospitable Healthcare Business

The incorporation of the Avaya Contact Center helped Emergencias, the most prominent company of extra-hospitable healthcare in Argentina, to keep an accurate, agile and flawless communication with its individual and corporate customers; this also allowed to respond, effectively, to life threatening cases while expanding and strengthening the business; improved its healthcare processes and consolidated its presence in the Healthcare market.

Caring for Healthcare

Emergencias is a leader company in the market of services related to healthcare and medical extra-hospitable emergencies. Founded in 1979 in Buenos Aires, over the years, the company never stopped growing and expanding to other national and international markets. We can appreciate its success through all the important acquisitions of competitive companies, specialized in the corporate market. This allowed the company to expand its services, incorporate comprehensive medical plans and provide more affordable healthcare to individuals.

En 2008, Emergencias became the first company in certifying its processes under the ISO 9001 quality standards; besides, the company was awarded the Premio Mercurio, one of the most prestigious awards for the healthcare market.

The Heart of Services

Development of software applied to healthcare has been one of the distinctions of its journey in order to improve its reception processes in the demand and administration of resources. This allowed the company to transfer this administration model and informatics applications to the system of medical emergencies of Catalonia, Spain.

Among other company products, stand out: Contigo, Club de Embarazadas (Pregnancy Club), Traslados especiales (Special Transfers), Cuidados domiciliarios (Home Care) and Emerphone, which are almost everywhere in the country, states Germán Nájera, CTO of Emergencias, who, together with the Operations Director, Pablo Montes de Oca, and the Infrastructure Chief Nicolás Woloszyn, lead the technology modernization project.

“Since we are an extra-hospitable healthcare company, we have between 10,000 and 14,000 services per day. This number may vary according to the season of the year (They increase in winter season). We have 2,000 employees plus other 5,000 service providers. We offer four important services: Life Threatening Risk, Medical Visitation, Scheduled Transfer and At Home Care. The key of these services is a contact center which categorizes the beneficiary and, based on the medical triage, defines the need for a transfer, a medical visit or if there is a life threatening situation”, explains Mr. Nájera, the engineer.

Flawless Response to Millions

We service between 3.5 to 4 million a year. Emergencias had a great technology challenge, trying to respond, flawlessly, to such a great volume of requirements. “We did not have a prioritized structure and automated distribution of services and VDNs”, Germán recalls.

“We come from Nortel with atrophic numbers, a high level of manual management to organize telephonic agents, without real time response and metrics. We performed an updated four years ago but it was not satisfactory”, he adds.

Due to all the above, it was very complex to state maximum levels of abandonment or define metrics. “Service level was not optimum; work load was disproportionate, unequal and with poor results to satisfy our customers. We had an analog switchboard, limited growth, we had to face very high costs and buy lots of hardware, among other disadvantages”, admits the CTO.

It was key to have a communication system to comply with operations for servicing critical situations 24/7, every day, since medical emergencies can happen anytime. “We cannot stop receiving calls. Failure in service availability could result in death”.

“Three years ago we decided to remove the partner and we evaluated other companies such as Cisco, Genesys and other alternatives. It was key for Avaya to listen to disadvantages, user experience, and understand the business before implementing the technology; Avaya got involved and took responsibility for what happened, hired architects and worked as a team for a telephonic re-configuration”,Germán Nájera adds.

High Efficiency Contact Center

Flexibility and Quality

Once the new solution was implemented, results became evident. A very important benefit for Emergencias is the flexibility to adapt, immediately, to the sudden changes in requirements. “From 2017 to this day, we occupy between 120 and 140 agents in peak time, and we can now move them in different skills in an automated way because we have real time metrics and we can make decisions immediately. The supervisor stopped doing this job manually and he now dedicates to more quality related aspects”, he explains.

The contact center is much more efficient since, with the same amount of people, we increased almost 40% of the volume of answered calls. Agents are automatically available. With a digital telephone service, through a SIP, costs lowered a lot and we opened the possibility of growing and broadening our services.

The automatic system allows to prioritizing segments, clients, types of service and, according to the risk involved, give priority to the actual emergency. This solution optimized the operation, improved the levels of care and service. “Today we have a level of abandonment of 4% for emergencies and less than 0.2% for Life-threatening Risk. This was a radical change for the customer and we mainly achieved greater customer satisfaction. We now take care of the customer in less than 4 seconds”, says Germán Nájera.

Regarding communication channels, before, they had 230 channels, now they have 1400. “Before, the marketing team made outgoing telephone calls with a different switchboard, with other telephone providers. Since everything was unified with Avaya, the first benefit was the operative maintenance cost of telephony, and the second, the reduction of the cost per minute of outgoing calls. Today, is very much efficient since the dial, is a predictive dial and we call according to the availability of agents who can answer those calls. Before, almost a million outgoing calls were made and today, less than half of them”, says the CTO.

Intelligent Communication

“When I started in Emergencias, almost five years ago, Avaya was a bad word. Other alternatives were being evaluated to change brands. My objective was to revert that opinion, since it was a leader brand with very good human personnel, with great skills. Avaya technology allowed us to expand the communication possibilities that we have with the customer. This year we want to have more omni-channel capability via SMA, WhatsApp and mail. We are now trying with Advantage, the possibility of implementing loT devices to perform monitoring activities or video-conferences of terminal patients and at home care.”

“This year, we also plan to implement Speech Recognition with speech analytics (intelligent IVR). We are thinking about a module to allow the digital visualization of central saturation. Our purpose is to strategically improve, for next year, the integration between Avaya and Salesforce”, concludes Germán Nájera.