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In the past, maintaining an efficient communications infrastructure was something of a challenge for IntegraMed America. Headquartered in Purchase, N.Y., the medical services company maintains 36 locations throughout the United States. Many of these sites rely on clinical staff working in remote locations, who confer with patients and colleagues on a continual basis. In addition, the company's administrative staff maintains a regular dialogue with its office locations to manage IntegraMed's ongoing operations, as well as to discuss marketing programs and sales projections.

Previously, IntegraMed relied on a patchwork of providers to handle its communications needs, using separate vendors for its communications hardware, software, carrier services and conferencing software. According to Vijay Reddy, vice president of information services, it was a cumbersome, expensive and inefficient approach that needed to be corrected.

"Trying to tie together various pieces of disparate technology from multiple vendors proved to be extremely unproductive and costly," he says. "The communications platform did not provide the applications that we needed to help run a business efficiently. We did not have any real visibility into our contact center performance, and could not measure how long it took our staff to answer calls and resolve issues.

"In addition," he continues, "our communications costs were escalating out of sight, particularly in terms of toll charges and our ASP-based conferencing solution. We needed to find an alternative that enabled us to leverage advanced communications tools, while keeping our costs under control."

For IntegraMed, which supports a national network of fertility physicians, delivering good customer service means much more than just having contact center agents field incoming calls.

"Constant communications between our staff and clients is an absolute necessity," explains Reddy. "For any one specific case, couples may have several conversations per day with one of our staff members concerning their treatments, and our individual offices may service as many as 150 couples per month. Handling the quantity of calls is very important, but handling them in the right manner is even more critical."

A managed services approach
As part of its research in identifying a new communications vendor, IntegraMed came into contact with Norcom Communication Solutions of New York, an Inter-Tel exclusive business partner based in Westchester County. The company realized that Inter-Tel technology could be integrated to help IntegraMed enhance and streamline its communications capabilities through voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) technology and advanced applications. What impressed Reddy the most was the ability for Norcom to deliver an entire solution for one fixed monthly fee through Inter-Tel's managed services program.

The managed services solution revolved around migrating the company's headquarters and several offices to Inter-Tel platforms; deploying numerous IP endpoints throughout the company's network to provide seamless communications for the company's remote workers; integrating Inter-Tel's Contact Center Suite to handle call center activity; and utilizing Inter-Tel audio and Web conferencing to replace the high-priced Web-based service that IntegraMed was previously using. In addition, IntegraMed elected to deploy Inter-Tel's Unified Communicator application, a presence-management tool that enables the company's staff to prioritize and route incoming calls.

"The systems offer a number of benefits to IntegraMed," says Nancy Ecklond, account manager for Norcom. "For example, the Inter-Tel 5000 platforms support up to 250 users, and can easily be networked together to increase capacity, so IntegraMed never has to worry about outgrowing their system. Additionally, the system supports digital and analog devices. This gives IntegraMed the power to choose where and when it deploys IP communications without fork-lifting out its entire infrastructure."

By giving members of its remote clinical staff IP endpoints, these professionals have the identical feature set as if they were working onsite. Most importantly, it is transparent to patients, who call into the IntegraMed call center and are seamlessly transferred to a clinician who may be working miles away from the office. This improves response times and enhances the personal attention IntegraMed gives to its patients.

Inter-Tel's Contact Center Suite gives IntegraMed full visibility into the performance of its call center agents. The solution, which integrates into the Inter-Tel platforms, delivers a wide range of measurements and statistics, allowing IntegraMed to better manage its resources to make sure that patients are properly handled.

call metrics available
"We rely heavily upon Contact Center Suite to give us a fast and accurate snapshot of how quickly we handle incoming calls," reports Reddy. "The information we receive, such as average wait times, abandoned calls, average length of calls and other data, gives us a wealth of information, such as identifying specific times when our agents are busiest, and how well they are responding to client needs."

One of the costliest elements of IntegraMed's previous communications solution was its reliance on a Web-based conferencing application. Frequent use of this service-sometimes up to 30 times per week-resulted in high costs that needed to be addressed.

Through Inter-Tel's managed services program, Norcom deployed Inter-Tel Audio and Web Conferencing, a premise-based application that is integrated into the core communications system. This IP-based tool delivers robust audio- and videoconferencing capabilities, along with collaboration tools for sharing documents and recording and archiving online training sessions, at a fraction of the cost of Web-based services.

Another IP application that IntegraMed leverages is Inter-Tel's Unified Communicator, its presence-management and call-routing tool. Through this solution, IntegraMed's sales staff can prioritize and route calls to any device on the system, depending upon the nature of the call.

"Our sales staff really appreciates the Unified Communicator application," notes Reddy. "It gives them comfort in knowing that, wherever they are, they can transparently route calls to their existing location, to a colleague, or to voice mail, depending upon the specific situation. It has proven to be an invaluable tool for generating revenue and improving customer service."

For most organizations, integrating an entirely new communications system-including IP-based platforms, devices and applications-can be disruptive and, in the case of training personnel on new solutions, costly as well. By utilizing the managed services program, IntegraMed's experience was different. Instead of making a capital investment in new technology, IntegraMed was able to leverage the power of IP communications for a fixed monthly fee. If the company wants to leverage new technology in the future, it knows the associated costs of any adds-moves-changes in advance.

"From an operational standpoint, the managed services program allowed us to deploy voice over IP tools seamlessly, without disrupting the organization," concludes Reddy. "Plus, we've reduced our communications costs across the board about 30 percent, while enjoying enormous productivity and efficiency gains."

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