Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

A key prescription to enabling higher quality, more affordable and available healthcare, reports observers, is performing surgery on administration including back office technology costs while making customer service fitter and healthier.

 

A-Med Health Care is a specialty pharmacy based in Huntington Beach, Calif. that provides advanced medications, infusions, supplies and services to patients living with complex conditions has administered exactly that kind of treatment to its operations. The company, which provides support for patients suffering from conditions such as cystic fibrosis, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis, organ transplants and paraplegia, reports cost savings and improved customer service after deploying Interactive Intelligence’s Customer Interaction Center or, “CIC.”

 

A-Med uses CIC for SIP-based IP-PBX switching and applications for voicemail, fax, presence management, workgroup routing, interactive voice response, auto-attendant, unified messaging, and call recording. The Interactive Intelligence solution replaced an older Nortel system, which, reports A-Med Health Care’s chief technology officer, Johnathan Huettner did not offer the scalability and advanced features his firm needed as it grew.

 

Today CIC supports up to 200 A-Med employees including 40 contact center agents who assist patients with their pharmacy and medical supply needs. A-Med plans to expand CIC to support additional sites, including off-site sales representatives who work from home. The company is currently integrating CIC with its own internal customer support software, which it believes will further improve customer service.

 

“Our older system was maxed out and we needed a replacement that would cost-effectively grow with us, while enabling us to better serve patients and easily integrate with our own custom patient database,” said Huettner. “By unifying our voice and fax capabilities so we could consolidate carriers, and by automatically routing callers to the right person whether that person was working in the office or remotely, CIC has enabled us to reduce operating costs and improve patient service.”

 

Prior to selecting CIC, A-Med conducted a side-by-side comparison with products from Avaya, Cisco, NEC, Nortel, and ShoreTel. A-Med selected Interactive Intelligence because of its rich feature-set and ease-of-use.

 

“We were impressed with CIC’s ability to handle calls effectively and intuitively,” said Huettner. “In addition, the total cost for a fully redundant CIC system was much lower than several of the competitive products we looked at.”

 

A-Med purchased CIC from Interactive Intelligence reseller, Advanced Call Processing. ACP arranged for the hands-on demo that allowed A-Med to view, configure and test the solution in its own environment and with its own users. ACP then went on to implement and provide first-line support for the solution.

 

“ACP took the time to meet with us and understand the business needs that were driving our upgrade,” said Huettner. “The demo was critical for us in the decision-making process, because we got to see CIC in action. It eliminated any concerns we might've had when making the purchase decision.”

Interactive Intelligence is a Platinum Sponsor of ITEXPO East 2010, happening this week at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Fla. Rick Chin Solutions Marketing Manager, Interactive Intelligence, will be co-presenting two sessions during the conference, including “Multi-channel Contact Centers - Lessons Learned,” from 12 noon to 12:45 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 20, and “Unified Customer Communications – Beyond UC,” from 2:45 to 3:30 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 20. To attend these informative sessions and more, register now