American Red Cross’ (ARC) Blood Donor Program Deploys World’s Largest Dialer from SII

company-overview

Resources

American Red Cross’ (ARC) Blood Donor Program Deploys World’s Largest Dialer from SII

Customer

The American Red Cross (ARC)’s Biomedical Services collects 40 percent of the blood supply (6.5 million units of blood and 9 million blood products for transfusion) in the United States and distributes to some 3,000 hospitals and transfusion centers. They operate multiple call centers handling approximately 42 million inbound and outbound calls per year setting appointments for 4 million donors nationwide.

Challenge

American Red Cross’ vision is to automate, standardize, modernize and consolidate their regionally based call centers. The independently managed, regional call centers represented multiple databases, and various dialer systems. The challenge was to integrating legacy systems and next generation systems into one single platform in a hosted environment in the most efficient and cost effective way possible.

Solution

A complete customized Genesys PureConnect solution – fully hosted, two Tier 4 data centers – including switchover capability for disaster recovery via private SIP-based MPLS networks, custom interfaces to the legacy and next generating Oracle Siebel CRM while supporting the migration to a “One Red Cross” business organization.

SII procured, designed, installed, and is operating, hosting, supporting, and maintaining a Genesy PureConnect infrastructure that performs automated outbound dialing to blood donors across the U.S., receives inbound calls from the ARC’s toll-free number, and distributes the calls to approximately 1,000 Tele-recruiters in 3 ARC contact centers based on the donor’s geographic location and assigned ARC Division/Region.

SII, working in partnership with ARC, leveraged the full capabilities of the PureConnect Interaction Dialer® and other Genesys products to implement a customized solution, including:

  • Fully integrated the ARC Dialer infrastructure into the ARC LAN, WAN, desktop computer, and business application environments, including interfaces to the ARC’s Cisco Call Manager to route Voice over IP (VoIP) calls using industry standard Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to the Tele-Recruiting (TR) agent’s existing Cisco IP phones, and interfaces to ARC’s legacy and next generation applications for TR agents to capture customer interaction data in the ARC’s enterprise CRM databases.
  • Implemented the ARC Dialer Infrastructure in a dedicated Software as a Service (SaaS) model, which has allowed the ARC to minimize its capital costs and technical support requirements while maximizing its technical control, system performance, and system security. The ARC Dialer Infrastructure has lower security risks because all ARC business programs, although treated as separate companies using virtualization technology, are in fact part of the same company and there is no risk of another company accessing ARC data.
  • Developed custom integrations to the legacy CRM application and the next generation Oracle Siebel CRM application, which has allowed the ARC to better manage, schedule, and limit the business and technical risks while transitioning ARC blood donor regions across the country into consolidated call centers.
  • Developed custom handlers to Oracle update the database in real-time with call data and wrap-up codes from Interaction Dialer, which has provided the ARC with valuable customer and marketing intelligence.
  • Implemented skills based routing to significantly reduce the number of campaigns, which has resulted in greatly improved agent productivity because agents no longer have to transition between campaigns.

SII coordinated with ARC technical staff and:

  • Telecommunications vendor to design, install, operate, support and maintain the VoIP/SIP network including the DS3, Fast Ethernet, and SIP trunks that interconnects the ARC call center sites to the Tier 4 rated data centers (where the Genesys software is installed on HP blade servers) to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
  • Genesys and Oracle to install a CTI interface to the ARC’s Oracle Siebel CRM application to screen pop the donor’s record to the Tele-recruiter desktop computer.

SII help desk personnel:

  • Monitors the dialer network and coordinates with ARC personnel, telecommunications vendor, and third party system/service providers to troubleshoot and resolve routing and other technical issues and problems.
  • Maintains a trouble ticketing system to track and report on issues, problems, and resolutions.
  • Provides technical support to ARC from 7:00 am to 12:00 am, 7 days per week.

SII conducts weekly/bi-weekly conference calls with ARC to review outstanding issues and problems, as well as monthly reviews with ARC to review contract performance.

SII provided train-the-trainer sessions for ARC employees in the use of the new system.

Results

  • Dialer makes over 300 million calls a year which improved agent productivity by approximately 40%.
  • Reduced number of campaigns from 3000 to less than 400.
  • Standardized call center operations.
  • Improved customer and marketing intelligence.
  • Reduced the risk of transitioning to the new Dialer environment.
  • Leveraged its existing investment in Cisco phones for agents and supervisors

Accolades Received

Significant challenges in integration with legacy systems had to be overcome on a tight schedule and budget. SII, working with ARC, and Genesys stepped up to the plate beating every deadline.

  • The American Red Cross (ARC) is awarded Genesys’ Innovator Award at the 2012 Customers and Partners Conference. SII advocated for ARC to receive this award based on the innovative work ARC and SII is doing on the Dialer Platform.
  • Recognition Award received from the ARC, Pacific Northwest Region/National Call Center, Tucson, AZ. “Congratulations to the Dialer Project Team on the Genesys Dialer Production Launch” “We would like to personally commend the SII Team on the Dialer Production Launch. It was through your hard work and dedication to this project that has made this launch a success. Thank you for the long hours and sacrifices that were made to see this effort launch on time and without issue.” (2011)
  • Kudos from ARC on the subject of the InTouch integration:

“Wow! Quite a night! Great job finding and resolving a late-breaking yet highly impactful InTouch issue from late yesterday that would have slammed the call centers today! I know you all know and appreciate the business impact and take your support of the mission seriously, but still – you all have blown me away on this!

Team from SII – providing dialer support extraordinaire! As the evening wore on and the call centers closed, many of us thought we were going to have to deal with this problem in the morning. Not so! The remote desktop access and testing capability you guys displayed throughout the night was quite impressive! And the SII knowledge of their interface helped us eliminate possibilities one by one as the night wore on. There is no way we could have isolated the problem and tested out the solution without you all.”

  • From ARC during the receiving of an award from Genesys for this project:

“The entire SII organization from the top down is extremely customer-focused and committed to customer satisfaction. They have repeatedly gone above and beyond the terms of the contract to ensure Red Cross is able to deliver its mission. SII is extremely responsive to requests, very technically competent and extremely focused on customer-service. Highly effective in identifying root causes of issues, and proposing cost-effective and reliable solutions. They arealso very focused on customer-service. Conducts very detailed monthly and quarterly service delivery/quality reviews that ensure transparency into accomplishments, issues and plans.”

0 replies

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *