The Interactive Intelligence channel partner involved in the implementation was Melbourne-based CPS Technology Group.
Diabetes is the fastest growing chronic disease in Australia and the nation's sixth leading cause of death.
Around 1.5 million Australians have diabetes and for more than 50 years in Victoria, Diabetes Australia - Victoria (DAV) has been the peak consumer body and leading charity representing all people affected by diabetes and those at risk.
DAV helps fund diabetes education, awareness activities and research.
It assists over 200,000 Victorians with diabetes and has over 35,000 members, including those with diabetes, their families, carers and diabetes health professionals.
The Business Need
DAV has its head office in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne and a second site at Greensborough housing the organisation's call centre operation.
For many years, it operated with Fujitsu 9600 PABX systems at each site and these had been initially donated to the organisation as second hand units. They lacked functionality and had been unable to keep up with DAV's growing employee base and increase in service demand from its call centre operations.
To continue helping all people affected by diabetes, DAV needed to overhaul its technology and enabling systems.
The call centre provides a valuable outreach program in supplying information to people with diabetes as well as research professionals and a forum for where consumers can order products to manage their diabetes under the National Diabetes Services Scheme (NDSS).
However, with the growth in the number of people newly diagnosed with diabetes, the number of calls into DAV's contact centre had increased significantly.
"We had simply run out of available lines for new staff and faced a situation where our PABX was, in reality, six years beyond the end of its useful life," said John Popper, director of Business Development, DAV.
"We were unable to add extensions for any new complement in staff and suffered an increasing frequency of outages as the circuit board continued to malfunction. Quite frankly, the system was tired,"
One example of this was the organisation's frequent requirement for recording new messages. The lack of functionality in the Fujitsu PABX meant that any recording had to be conducted off-site which was both time consuming and expensive.
Following a review of the situation, DAV researched the market for an IP telephony solution which could also provide the business tools and connectivity to enhance the organisation's call centre activity.
"We knew that we didn't just want another copper-based PABX system as this would have quickly become obsolete in a business where we were experiencing significant growth in our call centre operation," added Popper.
The solution needed to be Voice over IP-enabled and capable of merging all telephony and data technologies into one digital platform.
The Solution
DAV's market review resulted in the selection of the Interactive Intelligence Enterprise Interaction Centre (EIC) solution.
EIC is an all software IP PBX for mid-size enterprises that incorporates SIP, along with integration to Microsoft products.
Its key features eliminate the need for costly voice processing cards, while improving reliability and lowering overall costs.
As EIC is built on the core Interaction Centre Platform, it allows DAV to add applications to scale with future growth, including outbound dialling, screen recording, and workforce management.
Applications include presence management; multi-channel queuing and routing; interactive voice response; speech-enabled auto-attendant; unified messaging; 'one number' find-me/follow-me and multi-channel recording and scoring.
The deployment was carried out by CPS Technology Group (CPS), an Interactive Intelligence Elite partner.
"While the Interactive Intelligence solution itself had a range of attractive features and functionality, we were impressed by CPS Technology Group's consistent and professional approach to the project at hand, their technical skills and an appealing confidence in being able to do the job properly," said Popper.
The Deployment
For DAV, the project brought a significant change in technology and infrastructure for the staff.
Not only was there the implementation of the new multi-site IP Telephony system, there were changes to the organisational structure.
They engaged a project consultant to assist in firming up the specifications and overseeing the installation.
Workshops were held with each of the departments and CPS used these meetings as "discovery" sessions.
The design focused on the call centre as the core operational centre for DAV's business and an EIC Premium Server and Switchover Server were installed at the Greensborough call centre.
The Elizabeth Street head office was provided with an ININ Business Continuity Manager SIP Proxy .
As part of the implementation, CPS delivered a new wide area network using Nextep's secure 'point to point' SHDSL services, providing 2m/2m bandwidth links to connect the Elizabeth Street and Queens Street offices back to the call centre at Greensborough.
They also upgraded the DAV data network during the EIC installation, providing Allied Telesys POE Switches for the organisation's suite of Polycom handsets.
The Benefits
The database system has enabled the organisation to converge its IT and telecommunications infrastructure for the benefit of various applications, including customer relationship management.
"Our call centre staff responded to 84,000 telephone enquiries and processed thousands of NDSS orders for diabetes products, membership and fundraising enquiries, event bookings, Life! program information, and research requests," said Popper.
In conjunction with the technology came an increase in the training for the contact centre agents.
This resulted in a significant improvement in call response times and service measures for the call centre, such as the time taken to answer a call or abandoned calls.
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