Arrendale Associates radically improves service to physicians.

Arrendale Associates, based in North Carolina, offers outsourced transcription services to doctors, transcribing doctor-dictated clinical notes into accurate, archived records that document patients' symptoms and the strategies for treating them.

But relying on its TDM-based call center infrastructure meant it couldn't seamlessly utilize all three of its contact centers in North Carolina, Maryland and Tennessee. All inbound calls were routed to a single agent, who would create a trouble ticket, then search for the best agent to work on the problem. This legacy system lacked intelligent call routing capabilities, resulting in long queue times, and with no CTI capability; physicians calling in had to provide redundant information with each call or escalation.

To overcome these limitations, Arrendale Associates decided to migrate to a converged environment by deploying Cisco IP Communications solutions. This included Cisco IP Integrated Contact Distribution (IP ICD), a robust contact center solution designed for mid-sized contact centers that provides ACD, IVR and CTI on a single platform. It also installed Cisco Unity[TM] Unified Messaging that delivers every e-mail, voice and fax message to a single inbox.

"With frame relay and an IP communications system in place, we've slashed telephony costs among our three contact centers by about $2,000 a month and agent productivity has soared," says Chuck Bennett, Vice President of Operations at Arrendale. "And the system now routes calls to the best available agent and provides screen pops of crucial customer and trouble ticket information. Our agents can now resolve physician or nurse questions immediately, dramatically improving our customer service ratings."