In the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), skilled staff answering non-emergency 111 calls must also be able to rapidly reorient to handle any sudden incoming emergency 999 calls if a major incident happens. To enable this flexibility, South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) turned to FourNet and an Avaya contact centre platform, which, through the Avaya ecosystem, could be tailored to deliver the contact centre solution it needed to meet operational demands and service level goals.
South Central Ambulance Services (SCAS) NHS Foundation Trust is the 24/7 emergency ambulance service for over 7 million people living in the English counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, and Hampshire. SCAS employs over 2,000 specialist staff who handle over 500,000 urgent calls a year from its contact centres located across the region, as well as homeworkers.
FourNet had rolled out the latest Avaya contact centre solution when, during the due diligence phase of the project, it identified that a specialist agent desktop application would be required to meet the needs of SCAS and its patients. Using FourNet’s specialist sector knowledge and extensive Avaya experience, it turned to the Avaya ecosystem to identify the right solution.
Specific Contact Centre Needs
South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) required that both 999 emergency calls and 111 non-emergency calls could be handled through the same technical infrastructure and operational units. Skilled staff employed to answer the growing number of 111 calls needed to be able to rapidly reorient to handle any sudden incoming 999 calls if a large-scale incident or emergency occurred. The flexibility to support this blended role is only possible with very bespoke contact centre technology that enables contact centre managers and supervisors to react to changing situations easily and efficiently on the fly.
As the service provider for the SCAS digital transformation project, FourNet – one of Avaya’s partners and an award-winning provider of cloud and managed services – was able to confidently look to the Avaya ecosystem for specific expertise and the right amount of codevelopment support to build the solutions SCAS required.
FourNet
FourNet works with more than half the UK’s Ambulance Trusts and has supported SCAS since 2018 to deliver life critical services. FourNet provides a highly available contact centre solution, based on Avaya technology, that handles both 999, 111 and Patient Transportation Services (PTS) as well as back-office solutions that support SCAS’s flexible, agile workforce.
Because seconds count, SCAS offers a unique multi-disciplinary approach that can require multiple specialist medical experts to listen in to an emergency call to help speed up initial triage of a patient and determine the next steps e.g., dispatch an ambulance as soon as possible for critical cases. This way of working necessitated a bespoke solution, which FourNet was able to deliver via its experience with the Avaya ecosystem. FourNet’s specialist sector knowledge and technological expertise helped translate SCAS’s operational requirements to ensure the right Avaya partner was selected.
“FourNet builds partnerships with all its public safety customers; this ensures we have excellent knowledge of working practises within the organisations and also knowledge of the marketplace and the solutions available to help improve patient/citizen safety in the UK.
SCAS is a Global Digital Exemplar market-leader, which is an internationally recognised NHS provider delivering improvements in the quality of care, through the world-class use of digital technologies and information.
FourNet helped SCAS gain recognition for delivering world-class quality care through digital technologies and information, setting the blueprint to enable other trusts to follow in its footsteps as quickly and effectively as possible,” said Ben Ryland, Head of Public Sector, FourNet.
Engelbart Software
To solve the challenge of building a bespoke front-end application for SCAS’s new contact centre solution, FourNet turned to Engelbart Software GmbH, a specialist developer for the operation and management of IT and unified communication and collaboration services. As an experienced and skilled Avaya DevConnect Technology Partner for over a decade, Engelbart Software has worked with Avaya and its partners to develop solutions for the public safety sector for more than five years. Its applications and solutions are developed with a deep understanding of Avaya technologies and interfaces and can be tailored for individual client’s requirements.
“Engelbart Software became fully embedded into the process of solution specification and design for the new bespoke user interface. Its developers’ detailed experience with Avaya application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) as well as their open approach to fully understanding the customer’s business requirement allowed all stakeholders to drive the project even beyond the initially scoped set of requirements,” said Markus Bornheim, Avaya International Practice Lead for Public Safety & Emergency Services.
esuits2 SPC
Engelbart Software proposed that its esuits2 applications framework could be assessed and evaluated as an alternative UI making it possible to define and design the integrations and user interfaces required by SCAS.
The flexibility and capability of the framework meant that when a number of previously unrealised requirements came up during the design and implementation phase of the project, they could be solved and SCAS’s specific operational needs met.
The esuits2 applications framework was able to leverage Avaya Core services for communications, contact centre and computer-telephony integration (CTI).
Then, due to its flexibility and bespoke approach to UI design and layout, external services integration such as real time reporting, instant replay of recorded calls, enriched Supervisor functionality as well as access to various directories could also be included.
The result was the development of an esuits2 Special Purpose Console (SPC) as an alternative call centre Agent and Supervisor frontend application based on a browser based HTML5 application linking into the Avaya core and leveraging the Avaya JavaScript Client SDK.
“Because it is based on the modular and flexible HTML5 architecture, it’s possible to add customer specific functionality and 3rd party applications into the soft client. Beside standard telephony services and the support of the Avaya solution, the esuits2 SPC offers rich API for service integration,” says Dirk Engelbart, CEO Engelbart Software GmbH.
The bespoke functionality requested by SCAS and provided by the esuits2 SPC includes a comms-screen for real-time status visibility between Agents and Supervisor; chat between Agents, Supervisors and departments/roles; the ability to agent assign skill/role during login and bookmarking of Agent- or department-based favourites. Supervisors also benefit from enhanced functionality including the ability to listen-in to existing calls; change skill / role assignment on the fly; change Agent status; remote Agent logout and replay of recorded calls. For the support of a work from home scenario a “raise my hand” functionality has been implemented to contact a supervisor if help is needed from the agent.
Flexible For Future
Chris Hayden, Telecoms Manager at SCAS, comments: “With help from FourNet and its partners, we ended-up with a solution that fulfils our needs and more. The management and team leaders now have much more control and visibility over their Agents than previously and they are now able to manage the various contact centre behaviours much more effectively.”
Engelbart Software esuits2 Special Purpose Console SPC offers a unique and flexible solution that provides two operation modes enabling SCAS to keep its voice and data network separated. In the SCAS contact centre, the primary mode of operation is based on computer-telephony integration (CTI)-driven 3rd-party call control with the Engelbart esuits2 SPC controlling the Avaya IP phones that the Agents use the on their desks. As an alternative to this, the Engelbart esuits2 SPC’s native VoIP operations can leverage WebRTC between the Avaya solution and a PC and a browser, enabling Agents and Supervisors to work remotely should work from home requirements be once again put in place.