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28.10.2009
Marie Curie turns to Sword Ciboodle for best patient service
Enhanced referral system and improved reporting cited as key goals for cancer charity
Glasgow, U.K. October 27, 2009 – Sword Ciboodle (www.sword-ciboodle.com), provider of customer-oriented business software and services, today revealed that it has been selected by Marie Curie Cancer Care (www.mariecurie.org.uk) to help support the charity’s objective of increasing and improving the level of service it provides to patients and their families.
Employing more than 2,700 nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals, Marie Curie Cancer Care is one of the UK’s largest charities and provides care to around 29,000 terminally ill patients in the community and in its hospices, along with support for their families. The organisation has a strategic goal to double its level of patient care over the next three years, and chose Sword Ciboodle as the platform that will help support that growth.
"We knew that we needed to explore how new technology can help us improve our processes to increase the number of patients we can support and to generally improve our services," said Keith Floodgate, Assistant Director Business Development, Marie Curie Cancer Care. "Sword Ciboodle has demonstrated to us that it is aligned with our goal of putting patients and families first, and we are looking forward to seeing the results of this project, which will help support the direction of this charity for many years to come."
The largest component of Marie Curie’s work is the provision of in-home care for patients that wish to spend their last days at home, rather than in a hospital. The scheduling of nurses’ activities is currently a challenging exercise, with the requirements of patients and their families fluctuating depending on many factors such as availability, stage of illness and so on. In addition, Marie Curie Nurses is introducing new options that extend the service to include rapid response and shorter day and night visits, which adds further complexity to the scheduling exercise.
In Marie Curie’s referral centre, the organisation currently uses a nurse matching system that needs to be upgraded as it can take as long as 20 minutes to assign a nurse to a patient’s home. The charity is looking to Sword Ciboodle to improve the level of service that it offers to those calling the referral centre by shortening the time required to complete a referral, and to improve integration with its financial system for accurate billing and salary payment. In addition, Sword Ciboodle’s out of the box case-handling feature will help Marie Curie to manage its relationships with Primary Care Organisations throughout the UK.
Improved reporting capability is also a key feature of the project. Marie Curie management is keen to be able to determine what ability the organisation has to provide its service at any given time, and Sword Ciboodle will provide access to the real-time data needed to be able to support this. In addition, accurate reporting is an important element for Marie Curie to be able to demonstrate its performance against key metrics to those organisations that provide funds for care provision.
"We needed a solution that would be a strategic part of our organisation and give us a dynamic and flexible platform that we can build on as we go forward," added Floodgate. "With its process-based approach to building software, Sword Ciboodle will provide us with a solution that can grow and adapt to our changing environment, ensuring that our organisational objectives can be supported by our technology over the long term."
Sword Ciboodle’s strength in delivering web-enabled customer service applications will also be a key factor, as Marie Curie seeks to make its services as widely accessible as possible.
"All of us at Sword Ciboodle are delighted to be working with Marie Curie Cancer Care as both a customer and one of our chosen charities," said Kenny Bain, CEO, Sword Ciboodle EMEA. "The support that Marie Curie Cancer Care provides to terminally ill patients and their families is truly inspirational and we are honoured to be working with them."
The first phase of the project, which will see the replacement of the existing referral system, as well as the delivery of reporting and case handling features, is expected to go live in spring/summer 2010.
About Sword Ciboodle
Sword Ciboodle helps improve the way large organisations interact with their customers. The combination of award-winning, process-managed CRM software and specialist consulting and delivery services help Sword Ciboodle’s clients achieve higher revenues from their customers and reduce operational costs. Sword Ciboodle is consistently recognised by industry analysts as one of the world's leading customer-centric technology providers. For more information, please visit www.sword-ciboodle.com.
Media and analysts contact:
Danny Sullivan
inmedia Public Relations Inc.
Tel (UK): +44 (0) 141 404 6478
Tel (US): +1 613 686 5657
Email: dsullivan@inmedia.com
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26.10.2009
Nominations now open for Contact Centre Innovation Awards 2010
The Contact Centre Innovation Awards offer industry recognition for work that has made a significant impact on contact centre performance, operations and strategy in the last year. Nominations are now invited from European centres for all categories including the highly-coveted Innovation of the Year.
Organised by the Professional Planning Forum - as part of their work to promote best practice in contact centres and to professionalise the role and contribution of analysts and planners – these awards showcase initiatives that make customer contact centres a great place to work and a pleasure for customers.
Uniquely, these awards are presented to organisations who can demonstrate a step change in performance for business, people, customers and other stakeholders during 2009. They are an excellent opportunity for customer contact teams and planning professionals to gain external recognition and validation for their hard work and success.
“We run these Innovation Awards because we want to show the huge progress that is being made in contact centres to improve life for both the customers and the employees – and to demonstrate that planning analysts are often critical to making these improvements happen”, explains Paul Smedley, Executive Director.
Nominations close on 10 November. Applicants should email awards@planningforum.co.uk for and entry form or look online at www.planningforum.co.uk.
Winning entries have to demonstrate measurable improvement, evidence of an integrated strategy for performance improvement and the role modeling of best practice. In addition, because the standard of these awards is maintained by rigorous assessment, participants often comment on how much they themselves have learned by the process of preparing information and being visited by the Forum’s teams of assessors.
As well as the highly-coveted Innovation of the Year Award, award categories have included scheduling innovation, management information, customer experience planning, employee engagement, performance management, implementation of workforce management and public sector innovation. Other key areas for potential awards include planning for the back office, integrating front and back office or planning outbound activity. With winners including large and small centres from every sector, the best practice case studies provide a resource that drives learning in every part of the customer contact industry.
The Innovation of the Year Award 2009 was presented to QVC for the impressive and pioneering planning initiatives that cut occupancy by 15% in the call centre, dropped agency hours by 23% in the distribution centre and cut team leader admin from 50% to 11% of their working week. EDF Energy won the 2008 award for their ground-breaking new end-to-end service delivery for new customers, Salford City Council in 2007 for their Think Customer initiative, Tesco in 2006 for a programme of change that took the stress out of their Christmas peak period and HBOS in 2005 for developing initiatives to improve work-life balance and schedule efficiency.
For further details contact:
Katherine Potter, Katherine.potter@planningforum.co.uk
Or Paul Smedley, paul.smedley@planningforum.co.uk
Tel: 0333 123 5960
The Professional Planning Forum (www.planningforum.co.uk) is the independent industry body for effective resourcing and planning in the contact centre industry, working across all industry sectors to provide specialist support for contact centre professionals. Championing the importance of these critical skills, the Planning Forum is widely recognized for its best practice research and case studies, as well as the results-focused nature of its professional development training and in-company workshops. The Planning Forum runs the Contact Centre Innovation Awards and Customer Contact Planning conference, to be held in London on 19 - 20 April 2010.
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20.10.2009
Queensland Government departments select Sword Ciboodle for contact centre
Product’s ability to deliver high quality customer service over multiple channels cited as a key factor in decision
Sydney, Australia – 20th October, 2009 – Sword Ciboodle, provider of customer-oriented business software and services, today announced that it has been selected by two Queensland Government departments to deliver the CRM technology platform supporting operations of a new contact centre to be shared by the Queensland Police Service (QPS) and Smart Service Queensland (SSQ). It is expected both agencies will collectively handle more than four million contacts annually through the new centre.
Following a successful project scoping stage, Sword Ciboodle has been awarded the contract to roll out its award-winning CRM software across the new contact centre. Sword Ciboodle has been engaged to deploy a customer relationship management solution for the QPS Policelink contact centre initiative.
Supporting QPS operations, the introduction of Policelink will provide an additional multi-channel point-of-contact for anyone wishing to make non-urgent contact with Queensland Police. The QPS anticipates that Policelink will reduce the call burden at existing police stations and establishments, increase capacity of operational police, facilitate the delivery of improved client service to the community and decrease the volume of inappropriate calls to Triple Zero (000).
Sword Ciboodle has been selected to provide measurable improvements in operator efficiency, as well as improved data quality and entry and client service. Sword Ciboodle is to deliver a platform for Policelink that will be integrated with police records, workforce optimisation and telephony solutions, which is anticipated to provide a significant reduction of transaction time. The system is also planned to capture and utilise customer interaction history to enable improved service delivery.
"Sword Ciboodle has an excellent pedigree in delivering high quality client services via multiple channels," said Brian Donn, CEO Sword Ciboodle Australasia. "With its easy to use functionality, our product can help maximise the effectiveness of new staff as quickly as possible through its advanced process and knowledge support."
Smart Service Queensland is the "front door" to the Queensland Government – delivering service excellence for Queenslanders. SSQ makes Queensland Government services more accessible, efficient and convenient to members of the public across three channels: one website (www.qld.gov.au), one phone number (13 13 04) and one integrated service counter. Services include general enquiries, concession applications, vehicle registrations, licence applications and so on. The Sword Ciboodle platform will provide SSQ with the ability to integrate more services on behalf of government departments and agencies, and provide an opportunity for government to deliver a wider range of services.
For SSQ, Sword Ciboodle has been contracted to deliver a platform to capture and maintain all content across all three channels in the contact centre environment, providing a single view of each customer, and ensuring content follows the customer through the life of the transaction, regardless of which channels they use. The platform will also be required to provide a dynamic scripting platform, and will track enquiry topics and report on time taken for each interaction across topics, which will be used as a billing and invoicing platform for cost recovery.
"Sword Ciboodle’s ability to provide a secure environment, where agents have access only to information required for the transaction, is an inherent feature that was required by both SSQ and QPS," said Donn.
Sword Ciboodle is the award-winning business-process-driven CRM software product for multi-channel contact centres. Working with customers including Crazy John’s, Australian Unity and Telecom New Zealand, among others, the company has built on its global success to increase its presence in Australasia and position the company for future growth.
"We are very excited to be working with the Queensland Government on these projects and look forward to designing a powerful platform for the new contact centre," added Donn. "Following on from our successful delivery with Crazy John’s last year, these customer wins are a great way to round-off 2009 and we hope to build on this going into 2010."
About Sword Ciboodle
Sword Ciboodle helps improve the way large organisations interact with their customers. The combination of award-winning, process-managed CRM software and specialist consulting and delivery services help Sword Ciboodle’s clients achieve higher revenues from their customers and reduce operational costs. Sword Ciboodle is consistently recognised by industry analysts as one of the world's leading customer-centric technology providers. For more information, please visit www.sword-ciboodle.com.
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01.10.2009
InVision Software Wins Frost & Sullivan’s Competitive Strategy Leadership Award
Birmingham / Ratingen (Germany), September 29, 2009 – For the second year in a row, InVision Software, a world-leading supplier of workforce management (WFM) solutions, was honoured by Frost & Sullivan for its Competitive Strategy Leadership in Agent Performance Optimisation (APO). The analyst firm acknowledges the remarkable success of InVision in the EMEA region where the company has garnered a significant portion of the contact centre market, despite regional structural barriers that slowed down the adoption of WFM systems, notwithstanding the economic downturn during the last year.
“InVision's approach to workforce management is having success because the company has built it on a completely web-based framework, which makes it easy for customers to adopt and maintain. That also provides fairly low overall total cost of ownership for the end user”, states Keith Dawson, Principal Analyst of Frost & Sullivan, Information and Communication Technology. “InVision's highly sophisticated scheduling engine can accommodate the many variables that come into play when organising workers with multiple languages and complex shifts. The company clearly benefits from its extensive knowledge of conditions in its home region, and from an innovative technology base.”
The analyst points out that with a singular focus on workforce management, the company's research and development effort has not been distracted by trying to build a full-blown APO suite. Rather, InVision has staked its future and its market position on being a true best-of-breed provider of advanced systems for scheduling in one of the world's most complex workforce environments. Nevertheless, the InVision solution is open enough to interact with important applications in those other APO areas from other vendors.
“Frost & Sullivan substantiates our strategy focusing on enterprise-wide WFM”, says Peter Bollenbeck, CEO of InVision Software. “Because our software solution, InVision Enterprise WFM, is designed from the ground up to operate inside and outside contact centres, it natively supports blended scheduling algorithms for multi-channel environments. As contact centres are increasingly forced to schedule agents across different channels like email, SMS, chat or any other web2.0 interactions, we support them managing this new challenge.”
InVision Enterprise WFM has a unique, patent pending technology for demand-oriented planning for any contact centre environment that is multi-site, multi-channel, multi-skill, or multi-activity. The technology blends different scheduling algorithms for different channels into one optimised schedule. The embedded optimisation algorithms create best schedules without the need for time-consuming and erroneous mimicking of ACD routing rules.
About InVision Software
InVision Software is a world-leading supplier of enterprise-wide workforce management solutions which enable companies to optimise their staff planning and scheduling processes. InVision empowers customers to reduce personnel costs, increase productivity, improve employee satisfaction and to boost revenue by leveraging better customer service. Founded in 1995 and based in Ratingen (Germany), InVision currently employs more than 220 WFM specialists and has offices across Europe, North America, and South Africa. InVision Software AG (IVX) is listed in the Prime Standard Segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Among InVision's clients are numerous international blue chip companies, such as ABN Amro, Allianz, BMW, Deutsche Telekom, IKEA, Sky and Vodafone.
Further information: www.invisionwfm.com
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