East Midlands Ambulance Service

The Company:
East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) provides emergency and urgent care, patient transport, call handling and clinical triage services for 4.6 million people across the six counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire (including North and North East Lincolnshire), Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire and Rutland.

The Challenge:
EMAS were using an old command and control communications system to manage emergency services that lacked ACD functionality.  An ACD system is used to validate callers, provide basic call routing to the first available agent, deliver skills based routing, forward calls to the right party, allow callers to record messages, gather usage statistics and balance the use of phone lines. The limitations of this system meant that EMAS could not accurately monitor call flow and were unable to determine the number of 999 call agents they needed.

Type: Emergency Services
Location: East Midlands, UK
Configuration: Deployment of a Mitel 3300 IP Communications Platform with ACD functionality, complemented by the Mitel Contact Centre Management Suite along with Cybertech (Activa) Call Recording would best fit the Services’ requirements.
Website: http://www.emas.nhs.uk/

Customer Needs:

• A Contact Centre Solution with ACD functionality
• A communications platform that is 100% reliable, resilient and safe
• A communications solution to add on future applications to grow with the organisation when required

Solution Components:

• Mitel 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP)
• Mitel Contact Centre Management Suite

Results:

• EMAS achieved a 20% performance gain through being able to handle 20% more calls at the same pick-up speed with the same number of people
• Increased staff familiarity with the Mitel system has contributed to that average answer time dropping below 5 seconds
• EMAS is in the progress of developing their requirements for integration between the Mitel 3300 ICP and applications such as radio and patient record systems