The Challenge
NSW Health manages contact centres that deliver services to both staff and consumers. Previously, these used traditional on-premise infrastructure with physical handsets and landlines. This increasingly posed challenges such as high operating costs, difficulty to scale up or down, inflexible Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and message recording functions, and separate systems for call ticket management.
With multiple inbound phone numbers in circulation, it could also be challenging for staff and consumers to find the right phone number to call for the service they were seeking. This led to extended time on the phone if calls needed to be transferred between services.
Some services, although available across the state, used different systems. This made it challenging to get a clear and comprehensive statewide view of the customer journey. Bringing services onto one cloud-based platform would enable better visibility to improve service delivery.
The Plan
A new contact centre solution was needed to ensure NSW Health could continue to improve contact centre efficiency and the caller experience. Flexibility and scalability to meet the needs of diverse services for staff, consumers and patients across NSW Health was also important.
As a result, eHealth NSW implemented its first cloud contact centre in 2019 to replace the system for NSW Health’s internal IT support line, the State Wide Service Desk (SWSD) and HealthShare NSW’s Customer Service Contact Centre. It included an integrated service management solution to manage the requests and issues received, and to also enable staff to log issues via an online portal, SARA.
During the pandemic, cloud contact centre technology enabled eHealth NSW to rapidly stand up new contact centres to support NSW Health’s public health response. The SWSD was also easily scaled up to onboard additional agents to support the increased demand for IT support as NSW Health’s non-frontline workforce shifted to remote work.
The Outcome
eHealth NSW has now implemented 80 cloud contact centres for both internal and consumer-facing services. This has enabled multiple phone lines to be consolidated, making it simpler to access services. It has enhanced task management to improve contact centre operations, improved analytics, and provides other features that are contributing to reduced wait and call times.
For cloud contact centre staff and operations, workflow and service delivery is improved with new tools including:
- real-time data and trends
- integration with a ticket management system
- conversational analytics that detect caller sentiment and call themes
- live knowledge support articles that appear to agents during a call to help them answer enquiries
- option to live chat with contact centre staff.
The Benefits
Some of the many benefits of the cloud contact centres include:
- consolidation of multiple phone lines to make it simpler to access services
- reduced wait time and call abandonment rate through personalised call routing and features such as call back requests and live online chat
- new contact centres can be set up in weeks rather than months and easily scaled up or down to meet demand
- enhanced call analytics give contact centre staff insights into call performance and enquiry trends, making it easier to identify improvement opportunities.
Data correct as of June 2024
Related solutions
SARA is the portal for NSW Health staff, to seek support and make requests for services, such as IT, finance, recru…
eHealth NSW is transitioning IT infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud to provide greater scalability, flexibi…
eHealth NSW provides IT support to NSW Health through the State Wide Service Desk (SWSD) on 1300 28 55 33.