You are in:
TENYAS implements recording solution in virtual call centre
TENYAS implements Activa’s recording solution in its virtual call centre to support its extended services to the community...
Tees East and North Yorkshire Ambulance Service (TENYAS), England’s largest geographical ambulance service in the country, is implementing the Veritel communications recording platform from Activa Solutions in its control rooms and contact centres. The new Veritel digital recording solution has been chosen as the most resilient and flexible platform for supporting TENYAS’ state-of-the-art Virtual Call Centre and ultimately improving patients’ access to the NHS.
Through its control rooms in York and Middlesbrough, TENYAS has been providing since 1999 accident and emergency response (999 calls) and a non-emergency patient transport service for people who require medical care at NHS expense, but do not need the skills of an ambulance paramedic or emergency medical technician. In 2004, TENYAS was awarded the contract for providing GP out-of-hours services and two additional call centres based in York and Hull were incorporated into its operations.
Due to this service extension and to their commitment to deliver the best and most responsive care service to the community, TENYAS created a Virtual Call Centre with an automatic queuing system that links five separate call centres so that they transparently operate and can be managed as just one single point of contact with the patients. As part of this new infrastructure, TENYAS has chosen the Veritel recording solution for recording and storing radio, VoIP and telephone conversations locally at each site with central archiving for total resilience and remote administration and call search and replay facilities for flexible management.
"We chose Activa’s Veritel recording solution because it provides us with the optimum risk management and operational flexibility to match our requirements. Its intuitive user interface makes it very easy to use and allows us to achieve total resilience and reliability by storing calls locally at each site and remotely archiving them to our existing storage server." Commented David Johnson, Assistant Director of Information Management & Technology at TENYAS. "We are very innovative in the use of new technology to support our services to the community and we are also very thorough with its adoption. We invested in the Veritel platform since we feel it can grow and develop according to our current and future service demands."
On average, TENYAS Virtual Call Centre handles over 810,000 calls per year, of which 210,000 emergency calls, with 60 operators across the five centres. All calls are recorded for evidential and verification purposes. Additionally, TENYAS is required to randomly audit 6% of all emergency calls for quality assessment and identification of operator’s training needs.
The solution that Activa is implementing for TENYAS comprises four networked Veritel recorders at each site providing 56,000 hours of local on-line storage each. Recorded calls can be scheduled for central archiving to TENYAS’ existing Network Attached Storage (NAS) device located in York. The Veritel recorders will record all communication traffic from telephone and radio sources and over the existing VoIP network. Veritel recorders are Airwave-enabled and will facilitate TENYAS’ adoption of the Airwave digital radio network system planned for 2006. TENYAS personnel will be able to remotely administer the recorders at each site, benefiting from time and operational efficiencies. Due to Veritel recorder’s browser-based interface for call search and replay and its unlimited number of users licences for accessing the recordings, TENYAS’ management can gain access to calls via the NHS intranet from any location and at any point in time.
