Key Statistics

3

Contact centres

4,000

999 calls handled each day

5,000

Staff

15

Ambulance hubs

5,000

Square miles covered

5.6m

Population served

Background

The service had two Emergency Operations Centres and handled 111 calls from a separate contact centre. Operating more than 460 ambulances and handles around 4,000 999 calls every day, from 15 ambulance hubs across the region. The Trust’s contact centre solution was nearing end of life and required an upgrade, while a new Department of Health programme to replace outdated analogue radio and communications systems with a new digital Ambulance Radio Programme (ARP) service across all NHS Ambulance Trusts in England also meant that a change of telephony was needed. The organisation originally intended FourNet’s contact centre solution to cover just 999 call services. But after they took over NHS 111 calls from the previous handler, a similar contact centre solution was required for non-urgent 111 calls. This has enabled them to pool its resources and technology.

Solution

FourNet designed, built and implemented a best-of-breed Avaya contact centre solution, which allowed our client to easily manage contact centre agents and agent skills assignment, as well as contact centre supervisors, managers, users and administrators whilst also handling queues and call flows, holiday tables, announcements, service hours, time of day tables and policy routing tables. The comprehensive reporting platform provides real time and historic data which allowed them to provide management information (MI) reporting internally, but which meet national reporting requirements. FourNet provides 24:7 service desk support and proactive monitoring through its ITIL aligned ESP platform. This pro-active monitoring with self-healing means that problems can be averted and resolved with no manual intervention. FourNet also monitors third party supplier providers and platforms. The solution is 100% cloud-ready. As part of the deployment, FourNet has integrated the service into 3rd party SIP trunks which will allow the client to migrate to cloud technology at their own pace. The solution has been designed so that the service is primed to deliver NextGen999 when it decides the time is right to do so. This could include offering webchat and video triage.

Benefits