MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--May 30, 2006--Nuasis(R) Corporation announces that the NuContact Center system has been selected by UCSF Medical Center for its patient-facing call center. The Medical Center, which is part of the University of California, San Francisco, selected the Nuasis system to support the interoperability of its call center with multiple hospital departments while also establishing a non-proprietary vendor foundation for call center growth and expansion. The software-only, standards-based architecture of the Nuasis system allows the Medical Center to accomplish these goals.
Recently ranked in the Top 10 of America's Best Hospitals by US News & World Report, the UCSF Medical Center's Ambulatory Services Call Center supports the center's outpatient practices including patient registration, managing physician referrals, prescription refills and the schedule coordination of more than 135,000 patient visits per year. This averages out to 70 calls per day per call center agent, which is recognized by the health care industry as a best practice for hospital call centers.
"In health care, it's important to have the flexibility that allows administrative support personnel not to be confined to the actual call center but rather to be in the practice or specific department where they can interact with the care providers or patients," explained David Sproul, IT manager, emerging technologies and capital projects, UCSF Medical Center. "For a health care facility, allowing these departments to log on to the Nuasis system without leaving their physical location is similar to a 'regular business' call center that has remote agents -- that's the flexibility that Nuasis gives us," he added.
The NuContact Center's patented capability to easily deploy remote agents within hours and eliminate the need for proprietary phone sets, is based on the system's Enterprise Routing Architecture that extends the product beyond the physical confines of the formal call center. This capability also can be used to provide call center functionality to customer service personnel stationed in the field who are not normally part of the formal call center staff. The flexibility of the system provides remote agents with the same feature set that is available to agents located in the actual call center and will support the use of any hard phone device.
Sproul explained that the system's flexibility, including its ability to grow with a company, aligns with his plans to expand UCSF's call center operations in 2006 and beyond, saying that he will likely double his call center size in the next 12 months.
"In a city like San Francisco, real estate space for call center expansion is at a premium. To have a single large space of 12,000 to 13,000 square feet available when we're ready to expand to that size is not realistic simply because that size of space in this city is just not going to be available. And doubling our contact center size in the next 12 months will require us to have more real estate. So the Nuasis system provides us with a great opportunity to have numerous remote sites scattered around the city that we can manage as a single entity," Sproul explained.
The system's Enterprise Routing Architecture gives UCSF the ability to expand call center operations to multiple locations easily and cost effectively and then manage the multiple locations as a single system. Central to the Nuasis architecture is a hub and node design. The hub and each node are networked together across the company's local or wide area network, forming a single, distributed contact center. Contacts can be intelligently routed to the best agent wherever the agent is located on the network. The hub and each node consist of NuContact Center software installed on enterprise-class, industry standard servers supplied by the customer. Instead of installing the software on one central server with one point of failure, the NuContact Center software is installed on separate servers, each performing a specialty function with no single point of failure.
In addition to being implemented in the Ambulatory Call Center, the NuContact Center has been deployed for UCSF Medical Center's internal help desk, known as the Customer Support Center (CSC), which serves 6,000 Medical Center employees. Originally a small help desk with about 4,000 calls per month, the Medical Center's CSC needed to ramp up to a 24x7 IT Customer Support Center averaging 8,500 calls each month. However, ramping up became a serious challenge with the outdated equipment. It was unable to support the business requirements of the organization, including leveraging Remedy Help Desk to provide customer screens to the agent desktops and handling different types of customer contacts on a single system. Sproul and his team decided to meet the challenges by leveraging IP technology and deploying the NuContact Center at the CSC.
"With the NuContact Center in place, we can now take advantage of screen pops and interaction with Remedy. When a call comes in, information is gathered from Remedy with many fields already filled in, and it is presented to the agent automatically on the NuContact Center agent desktop. This streamlines the process of taking the call," said Jim Fryhling, Assistant Manager, IT Customer Support Center, UCSF Medical Center.
The NuContact Center agent desktop is a browser-based user interface that allows agents to communicate with contacts via voice, email and web. This agent desktop provides access to all NuContact Center features and applications, including NuContact Shutters(R), a unique desktop application environment that improves agents' productivity by automatically opening and sizing applications, such as a CRM record, when and where they are needed.
About the Nuasis Contact Routing Solution -- Preferred Because of Proven Results
Companies such as Cellular South, UCSF Medical Center and Trover Solutions chose the software-only Nuasis contact center application for their business-critical customer service call centers. Nuasis customers are experiencing results such as:
-- Reductions in average wait times -- down to as little as 6 seconds on the first day of deployment
-- Reductions in average handle times -- as much as 50 seconds, resulting in a 30% increase in productivity per customer service agent and higher revenues
-- Productivity increases -- as much as 9 agent FTEs and $270,000 per year in cost savings by: 1) handling 87% of tracking and 90% of billing calls with self-service, 2) shaving 33 seconds off of each call with a screen pop, and 3) handling 11% of bookings through email, which offloads peak call volume
About Nuasis Corporation
Nuasis delivers call center innovations that improve customer service and reduce operating costs. The Nuasis NuContact Center intelligently routes customer inquiries via phone, e-mail, and web to self-service or live agents located anywhere. It is the preferred solution for mission-critical call centers over legacy ACD, IVR, and CTI systems. It competes against contact center products offered by companies like Aspect Software, Avaya (NYSE:AV), Nortel Networks and Cisco (Nasdaq:CSCO). Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Nuasis has offices in major metropolitan areas across the United States and Canada. For more information, contact Nuasis (650) 318-2200 or visit www.nuasis.com
