Preferred Home Care of NY Makes a Major Communications Upgrade with Avaya Cloud Office

As one of the state’s leading home care agencies, the business receives thousands of calls per day from patients, caregivers, case managers, and on-site coordinators about everything from payroll to patient issues. As CTO David Adress puts it, “We live on the phone system.”

This created issues for the organization when its existing service provider – a small, local business – started becoming increasingly unreachable in the event of an outage or other crisis. The provider offered the personal touch of a small-scale operation but was often difficult to reach when an issue occurred. This was frustrating for Preferred Home Care of New York staff, aides and most importantly its patients.

“Dozens of agents would be sitting there not getting calls, and we couldn’t reach who we needed to. All the while a caregiver could be having an issue with a patient, or an employee could be having a problem with their paycheck. Customer service is our number one priority. We had to ensure we could address every call with a human on the line ready to assist,” he explained. Issues with configuration, maintenance, and lack of administrative visibility were also prevalent for Adress and his team.

Adress was at first understanding about the downtime issues, but it started to become a pattern. It was then he knew it was time to buckle down and go with a more established provider. Avaya Cloud Office® by RingCentral– the all-in-one cloud-based communications and collaboration solution – was the perfect fit for the organization’s needs. The company now has almost 500 phone lines moved to Avaya Cloud Office with near-perfect uptime and performance. Looking ahead, management has plans to begin phasing out of existing video conferencing platforms to make Avaya Cloud Office its dedicated meeting and team collaboration solution. 

Award-winning Support for an Award-winning Solution

The level of support Adress received from Avaya during the rollout made a lasting impression. “We had a very pleasant experience with the product management team. They were impressive, professional, and thorough, yet also easy to work with. It was like talking to a friend,” he explained. “I’ve always said that you can have the best experts in the world but if they have poor bedside manner, it all goes out the window. Avaya exceeded our expectations.” 

The Avaya team was always at the ready, even and especially when challenges occurred (weekly team meetings ensured all tasks were being tracked in line with key objectives and timetables). This was a breath of fresh air for Adress, considering the organization’s previous struggles with lack of support and reachability. 

The implementation process required detailed attention. “We initially moved over 400 phone lines across multiple locations with many different call queues. It took time to get everything right. We had to do a soft rollout and test everything before porting all of the numbers over. I thought there would be a lot more issues for such a large implementation, but it ran very smoothly,” said Adress. 
 

A Powerful, All-in-One Communications Platform

Preferred Home Care of New York initially began using Avaya Cloud Office for outbound and inbound dialing but is planning to explore the many different features the communications platform offers to improve customer service and employee productivity. This includes video for meetings (the organization has many different departments and subdepartments – i.e., nursing, coordination, payroll) and automated notifications for more targeted communication among these departments and sub-departments. Screen-sharing, task management, presence, and chat are also at the ready to elevate their customer and employee experience. 

At the top of the organization’s “To Do” list: make more use of the system’s API. As part of the initial rollout, the home care agency was able to integrate its custom-built call center system (designed by its former provider) with the Avaya API so that if someone calls, their ticket will automatically pop up on the agent desktop. This enables the agent to see who’s calling based on the phone number, then look it up against the company’s EMR system to determine if it’s a patient or caregiver. The agent is able to have this information at their fingertips versus having to spend time manually searching.

“We do a lot of development internally, so it’s definitely going to be on our agenda to expand and introduce new feature integrations into the contact center program we have,” said Adress.

Intuitive Admin Interface and Easy-to-use Mobile App

Another major benefit of Avaya Cloud Office is the platform’s administrative interface. As mentioned, Adress had virtually no visibility from an administrative standpoint with the organization’s previous provider. 

“The system was very convoluted; it was almost impossible to configure and maintain. What would have taken us days or weeks to do before can now be done in minutes with Avaya Cloud Office. The system’s interface is designed so that it’s seamless and easy-to-use for anyone. If you were to get a new help desk tech, you could easily explain it to them and have them jump right in.”

According to Adress, the admin interface alone has saved his team at least 10-15% of productivity per day by streamlining and accelerating ticket issue resolution. 

Also helpful is the Avaya Cloud Office mobile app, which allows Adress, his team, and virtually any other user to communicate and collaborate anytime, anywhere. Adress, for example, can use the mobile app to easily add new phone numbers and order equipment directly from the administrative interface 24x7 – be it at home, during a meeting, or on the road.

Like so many organizations, Preferred Home Care of New York had to move operations offsite as COVID-19 swept the globe. The home care agency now operates in a hybrid model, with some employees working onsite and others remotely. As the organization looks to the future of work, the flexibility of Avaya Cloud Office gives employees freedom to work in the way that works best for them – be it using the desktop app or the mobile app.

Avaya Cloud Office unlocked major opportunities for Preferred Home Care of New York to improve and innovate communications with incredible uptime and customer support – enhancing productivity, customer experience, and brand reputation.