St. John Ambulance Western Australia recently came to the end of life with its legacy phone system and had decided to replace it with an on-premise product from Interactive Intelligence. This week, it announced that it has begun deploying the new Customer Interaction Center that will take over for its old phone system and sync with its existing systems such as its Computer Aided Dispatch System.
St. John operates as a not-for-profit humanitarian organization in Australia that helps to serve its region with first aid services. This includes ambulance, first aid training, community health events, industry-based health events, community first responder programs, and the operation of its College of Pre-Hospital Care and First Aid Focus programs. The organization said it will be able to continue to use its existing systems that have long worked with its legacy phone system while also reducing costs in the long run.
Ashley Morris, the technical services director at St. John, said the not-for-profit found itself with a legacy system from Zeacom that was not keeping pace with its needs as an organization.
"We faced a situation where our incumbent contact center telephony system was no longer being supported or indeed able to scale with our overall growth in services as an organization," Morris said. "CIC incorporates rich feature functionality, has robust redundancy and will integrate easily with our existing systems, including our in-house developed Computer Aided Dispatch System."
The CIC platform can automatically route calls, generate reports about calling histories, and support multiple communication channels. It has support for voice call routing, Web chat, email response, and SMS. Its reporting capabilities extend to creating historical reports, monitoring calls in real time, displaying call metrics, and configuring alerts. CIC even has the ability to enable speech recognition to enhance voice self-service.
St. John works with ambulance services across the entirety of Western Australia. This comprises approximately 1.5 million miles and is reportedly the largest area in the world covered by a single ambulance dispatch service. St. John handled a total of about 500,000 calls in 2013 and handles first aid trainings for nearly a quarter-million people each year. In short, the organization's scope is wide, and it is that breadth of scope on which Brandan Maree, vice president of Interactive Intelligence Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, commented regarding this partnership.
"We are delighted to sign on St John Ambulance Western Australia as a new customer in the state and it is a great example of the tremendous uptick in new customer contracts and business opportunities for Interactive Intelligence in Western Australia from both the public and private sectors," Maree said.
Obviously, this partnership can benefit both organizations as well as the public that depends on St. John to deliver emergency services to them and relies on its emergency training services to keep them up to date on their own administrations of first aid.