Case Study: Whakarongorau Aotearoa

BEFORE

A complex mission

Whakarongorau Aotearoa / New Zealand Telehealth Services unit serves New Zealanders across voice, SMS, chat, and other digital channels with a variety of helplines ranging from non-emergency inquiries to crisis intervention.

It operates across multiple contact centers, and until recently, ran on a conventional call center architecture with limited flexibility and a long cycle for any adjustments. “Every time we needed to upgrade, scale, or make any infrastructure changes, it took a longer time,” said Shane Jensen, Senior Project Manager.

Data reporting was also sluggish. This created difficulties in making prompt disclosures in circumstances like an unexpected health outcome, or a police or coroner’s request for information.

DESIRE TO CHANGE

Building on a solid base

After transitioning to NiCE CXone Mpower as part of a rapid transformation to meet public health needs during COVID-19, Whakarongorau wanted to continue the journey, adapting systems and processes to increase service capacity and tackle complexity with a smaller workforce.

Wanting to fulfill requests for information from law enforcement and other authorities was just the beginning. Whakarongorau recognized that its understanding of several key operations was limited, particularly the root causes for outbound calling activities.

The group wanted to become more nimble and able to launch and sunset short-term initiatives with alacrity. Pandemic response and changing modes of healthcare delivery have made clear that unexpected new initiatives may need to be turned around on an extremely tight timeline. “We need flexibility to stand those up quickly, and they’re often situations where there’s not a second chance to get the call right,” said Anna Campbell, Whakarongorau Chief Support Services Officer.

We made the right choice moving to NiCE, allowing us to take the next steps along our digital journey.

Nimai Stansfield

Architecture Lead Whakarongorau

NiCE SOLUTION

Power and flexibility for healthcare professionals

Whakarongorau’s lines are staffed predominantly by nurses and paramedics, along with doctors, preventive care experts, and nonclinical consultants. Sacrificing ease of use was not an option, so the enterprise expanded in the CXone Mpower deployment by adding Quality Management and AutoSummary. With the expanded solution, data is now available to meet heavy governmental reporting requirements on deadlines and to address special requests promptly.

“Reporting and monitoring of staff activity, productivity, and efficiency is now significantly improved and helps leadership make informed decisions about scheduling and budgets. Data is integrated from five different enterprise sources to provide a complete picture. “We’re very dataobsessed, and we have dashboards where leaders look at our core performance, including service level targets for all our services,” said Stasha Rmandic, Head of Analytics and Insights at Whakarongorau. “We have over 150 regular reports and in terms of how CXone Mpower QM enables us, we are happy users.”

With straightforward configuration and scripting, Whakarongorau can now launch new healthcare initiatives with very little lead time and quickly decommission them if needed after just a month or two. “We needed to be able to provide those new services while we still protect our core,” said Nimai Stansfield, Whakarongorau Architecture Lead.

Through Quality Management, call review is much moreautomated. Managers have the ability to easily review past interactions as well as listen in on live engagements and join in agent whisper mode if needed. NiCE and Whakarongorau continue to work together to identify efficiencies and features which can further streamline processes for providers and remove friction from healthcare conversations. “NiCE has been open to working with us so much more strategically than a tactical relationship because they’re seeing the big picture about the impact that we can have,” Campbell said.

RESULTS

Comprehensive, efficient telehealth care delivery

Whakarongorau has gained a comprehensive understanding of all agent activity, including previously opaque outbound call dispositions. “That’s really important for us to understand, because we weren’t sure why people were doing the follow-up work they were doing and taking themselves
out of inbound,” Rmandic said.

The CXone Mpower platform remains more robust than the previous solution, offering greater uptime for agents and callers. Many maintenance and update tasks can also take place without taking queues offline. The introduction of a callback queue has been so successful that AHT for both traditional inbound and callback contact is dropping but handling time on callbacks is fully one minute faster. Overall wait times are also down roughly 50%, and abandonment rates are also lower.

The NiCE ecosystem continues to support the aggressive service level targets Whakarongorau focusses on, and delivers accurate KPIs to all stakeholders, so they understand the performance of each initiative. “We made the right choice moving to NiCE, bringing us from 20th century to 21st century technology and allowing us to take the next steps along our digital journey,” Stansfield said.”

FUTURE

Toward an AI-powered future

Whakarongorau will soon deploy AutoSummary to free up more post-call work time to answer calls. “That’s something that we desperately need, as we’re noticing a massive increase in demand across most of our services,” Jensen said. “The greater capacity we can add into our system, the more people we can reach.”

The enterprise has been laying extensive groundwork for the expansion of AI in the workplace. “Some of our clinical teams were really concerned. We’re working to be able to maximize the time a service user can spend with a Whakarongorau clinician or counselor, unlocking capacity,” Campbell said. “And because of that work, we’re actually going to have a much better result.”