To service more customers more effectively, Sovereign Health (Pty) Limited has implemented NeuralAct AgentCare, a workforce management solution from Spescom DataFusion (Pty) Limited in its Durban contact centre.
A division of Medscheme, Sovereign Health manages a variety of funds and the processes involved in the delivery of cost-effective, quality healthcare.
Alan Hockey, general manager: call centre and Web development at Sovereign Health, says a call centre can only deliver superior customer service if its agents are properly utilised and cared for.
"One of the most complex and costly aspects of running a call centre is the training and management of agents, implying that a high rate of agent turnover is both expensive and damaging to an enterprise's customer service and support levels."
Sovereign Health operates a 60-seat call centre, while its entire contact area, which handles all forms of customer contact - telephone, fax, walk-in enquiries and Web interaction - has 90 staff members.
Hockey says Medscheme initially investigated various workforce management packages for its call centres and Sovereign Health decided to follow its choice of NeuralAct as the ideal solution.
"Spescom DataFusion and NeuralAct approached Sovereign Health together with the AgentCare Workforce Management suite, which consists of a comprehensive productivity and management empowerment tool."
Based on artificial intelligence, NeuralAct's forecaster application identifies trends in past call centre activity to gauge future usage patterns, so that call centre managers can accurately predict call volume and assess staffing needs, Hockey explains.
NeuralAct moreover focuses on the internal development and effective scheduling of each call centre agent, which significantly raises the contact experience for both customers and agents, he adds.
Hockey says the success of workforce management software is heavily dependent on the buy-in of agents and team leaders, as it instructs them how to schedule and utilises literally every minute of their working day.
"However, with NeuralAct, everyone at Sovereign Health's contact centre got accustomed to their new schedules and the new routine without much difficulty."
On average, service levels in Sovereign Health's call centre have improved overnight by about 40%, says Hockey.
"We are also handling 30% more business via the call centre, while 98.5% of all calls are now being answered within 30 seconds."
NeuralAct's workforce management solution also provides tangible benefits to contact centre supervisors, who, because of better management and control, experience less stress since fewer calls are waiting in the queue.
Hockey says Sovereign Health is very pleased with the NeuralAct purchase.
"We consider this software to have made a more significant impact on our service levels than any other call centre acquisition to date.
"Spescom DataFusion delivered brilliant service and support during the solution's implementation and training phase, with a high level of individual attention and accessibility," he concludes.
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Spescom Limited is an information and communications technology company with operations in US, UK and SA.
The group is active in two main areas of the world IT market, namely offering product and solutions to connect to the networked economy, and the provision of software solutions to manage information and knowledge.
The strategic focus is on the convergence of knowledge, document, configuration and voice transaction management technologies.
Spescom holds the controlling interest in US-based Altris Software Inc, a Nasdaq-, OTCBB-listed company, and developer of the award-winning eB software.
In SA, Spescom, in alliance with world-leading companies such as Cisco and Avaya, formerly known as Lucent Technologies, provides a range of customer contact and intelligent network solutions to its blue-chip customer base.
The company is a leading supplier of communications solutions and products to network operators and service providers on the African continent.
Spescom, through a joint venture with Siemens, is a world-leading supplier of revenue management solutions with installations in 42 countries, focusing on the prepayment of electricity services.
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