BT Openreach has announced it intends to switch off the traditional, copper-based telephone network in 2025. This is commonly referred to as the PSTN Switch Off.
If your business is still using landline telephones and fax machines, the switch off will dramatically impact your operations. You’ll need to plan for how this situation will change how your staff communicates with clients, customers, partners and vendors and how you’ll cope with that change.
While 2025 may seem a while away, from December 2023 you won’t be able to purchase any new ISDN or PSTN-based services, with many locations affected by a stop sell much sooner than that. At Amillan we are seeing an increasing number of customers being affected by being unable to purchase new ISDN lines or add new features at certain exchanges which have already implemented the stop sell.
Phase Out Timeline
| Now Phase Out Begins |
December 2022 Salisbury End of Life |
September 2023 UK-wide Stop Sell |
December 2025 UK PSTN End of Life |
| In preparation for the roll out customers across 170 locations cannot purchase new ISDN lines or add new features from end 2021. | The PSTN network is completely switched off in Salisbury. | Customers across the whole country cannot purchase new ISDN lines or add new features. | The PSTN network is completely switched off across the UK. |
What does this mean for my business?
The PSTN Switch Off will affect all businesses currently operating using PSTN and ISDN services. If you fall into this category, you will need to plan to move to the new VOIP network to keep your business phone system and your number working.
The migration may also impact legacy services like fax machines, security, lift and fire alarms, telecare devices, retail payment (PDQ) terminals and equipment for monitoring and controlling networks. These rely on some features of the PSTN that are not fully replicated in VoIP-based platforms and may require further upgrades to ensure they continue to operate following the switch off.
Customers using PSTN and ISDN services must take action
Amillan will be happy to assist customers in planning for and navigating the ISDN switch off. Please contact us and we will be happy to provide further information on how your organisation will be affected and what steps you need to take to ensure continued connectivity after the switch off.
We can offer a range of options including system upgrades for affected legacy services, migration to SIP and VOIP platforms or transitions to modern cloud-hosted platforms.
Please do not hesitate to contact your Account Manager or our Amilan Service Centre team on 0121 704 5840, who will be more than happy to assist.
“Delivering better value from every interaction” – How the Enghouse contact centre platform has helped ForHousing provide an enhanced service to tenants
Social housing provider, ForHousing, owns and manages 24,000 homes in North-West England, and delivers housing management services for other landlords. Part of the ForViva Group, they are focused on improving lives for their communities, customers, and staff, along with delivering affordable accommodation for their tenants.
ForHousing are passionate about the service they provide to their tenants. Back in 2016, most of their customer interactions were predominately voice-based. With calls on the rise ForHousing wanted a scalable “single pane of glass” solution which would integrate with critical business applications and support new digital channels, such as webchat, emails and social media to relieve the pressure on call handlers and resolve tenants’ queries more quickly and efficiently.
Angela Worthington, Group Assistant Director of Customer Experience, ForViva (parent company of ForHousing) said: “We also wanted to support additional capabilities including skills-based call-routing, and the ability to take card payments and not record, which together would allow us to offer an even more efficient service to our tenants.”
Their existing contact centre solution did not offer the functionality needed to support this new initiative. It was also inflexible when it came to making small changes to the system such as rerouting calls or putting a recorded message in place. Each new request had to be submitted to the IT team which made it difficult to be react to anything.
ForHousing decided to go out to tender to find a solution that could deliver on their requirements.
The Solution
Working with their IT partner, Amillan, they selected the Enghouse Interactive Communications Center (CC) solution. CC provides multi-channel capability, giving tenants greater choice in how they engage with ForHousing. To complement CC, ForHousing also implemented the Enghouse Interactive Quality Management suite (QMS), including call recording and score card functionality to monitor agents performance, and the Teleopti workforce management tool.
The initial Customer Service Centre implementation had around 40 users. With CC in place, Amillan has helped ForViva bring onboard over 100 additional users and extend the use of multimedia throughout when it bought Liberty Group, scaling CC to accommodate this growth. ForViva was quick to see positive results.
Reaping the rewards
One of the advantages of choosing Enghouse as its contact centre provider was the range of solutions it had to offer. Previously, ForHousing had multiple customer-facing solutions in place from different suppliers. By standardising on CC, it was able to utilise other applications such as their web-based Wallboard. This meant that agents had full visibility of performance data and call queue status no matter where they set up work for the day.
ForHousing also benefits from Call-back functionality. When call volumes are high and it is difficult to get through to an agent, tenants can now request a call back. This has helped to increase customer satisfaction as they no longer have to wait around in a queue, but it has also contributed to increased agent productivity and improved call centre efficiency.
The new solution also integrates with their CRM solution, Aareon. This gives agents instant access to more detailed information about their residents, enabling them to make more informed decisions and has resulted in increased first contact resolution.
Moreover, with the previous contact centre solution in place, it had been difficult to on board new users or support people working from home. With CC, it was possible to mobilise the contact centre team, with no disruption to service. It was easy to train people; add new users, route calls and set up new queues. The solution also offered ForHousing greater flexibility during lockdown. Some agents had to home school making it difficult for them to take calls, but using CC, ForHousing were able to allow them to focus on email instead.
Challenges in the management and processing of calls were also addressed by CC’s call recording capability. The system was PCI compliant as it automatically paused and resumed recordings when agents were taking card details. Screen and call recording along with score card functionality enables Team Leaders to access agents in a fair and consistent fashion. This has helped increase agent morale, reduce staff attrition, and improve the customer experience.
“Over the last year the Team Leader’s role has changed significantly”, added Angela. “With their teams now working from home they have lost that face-to-face contact and the ability to offer support when they can see an agent struggling. The Quality Management Suite has been invaluable during this time, allowing team leaders to monitor activity and intervene when an agent needs help.
“We also have greater visibility of the types of calls we receive, enabling us to spot any trends in the nature of enquiries, or provide evidence of any burning issues or repair complaints that may need actioning. And with the integrated survey module we can get a full picture of the customer experience”.
Chatbots and automation – Extending the benefits of the contact centre
ForHousing wanted to bring more automation into the contact centre and extend their hours to offer a 24/7 service to its customers. Working with Amillan they selected Converse360 to provide a service automation platform that can deliver web bots, speech bots and virtual assistants, all seamlessly integrated with CC.
The virtual assistant feature has been invaluable in taking pressure off the contact centre through the pandemic. Also, if the interaction with the virtual assistant needs to be passed through to the contact centre the details are automatically passed onto the agent so that they have a full history.
The virtual assistant is now handling around 60% of the chats that come through the ForHousing website and they have seen a 26% uplift in the number of monthly web chat sessions, within three months of it going live. The average handling time for live chat has gone down by around 90 seconds per session as a result.
With the virtual assistant dealing with many of the simpler interactions ForHousing can devote more time to calls coming through the Enghouse CC and has therefore improved its first call resolution rate. At the same time, agents can deliver an enhanced experience to tenants.
Reporting and management has also been transformed. ForHousing now have full “cradle to grave” reporting across all customer interaction types, whether it is the virtual assistance, voice or social media channels. This has provided greater insight into contact centre performance which in turn has helped drive down costs.
Delivering an exceptional tenant experience
Angela said: “It is not just about housing anymore. It is about improving lives and creating communities that grow and in which people are happy and want to live in. Equally, it is no longer just about tenants phoning up to pay their rent or report a repair. Calls are becoming much longer. Our average handle time has increased 10-25% in time terms because tenants have more complex needs, but thanks to the virtual assistant and the Enghouse Interactive CC, our agents are able to spend more time with them and add greater value to each interaction.”
Angela added: “We have found CC flexible and easy to adjust. We can now open the contact centre outside office hours and bring staff working from home online to deal with queries whenever we need them. Also the flexibility of the solution has made it easier to bring on new lines for specific functions, such as pharmacy calls during lockdown, and simpler to route calls to specific experts, as and when required.”
Over the longer-term, ForHousing is confident in the ability of the contact centre platform to deliver sustained benefits. The association is looking at moving away from on-premise solutions towards a cloud-based platform and it recognises the potential this offers in enabling it to make use of the data and analytics it has at its disposal to offer an even better service to tenants.
ForHousing is a forward-thinking social organisation whose members own and manage more than 24,000 homes across the North West.
ForHousing is about improving lives for communities, customers, and staff, delivering excellent quality, affordable accommodation, and housing services across the region.
Committed to creating positive opportunities for its customers, ForHousing build much needed affordable homes, empower people to gain training, secure employment, whilst also providing access to health and wellbeing support, creating sustainable and safe communities.
Amillan have worked closely with ForHousing (and the wider ForViva Group) since the introduction of a new multichannel contact centre platform in 2016 and have become a valuable technology partner, helping them in delivering their commitments to provide high customer satisfaction. In 2019 Amillan began a partnership with Converse360 who offer an innovative virtual assistant solution built upon an industry leading service automation platform.
THE PROBLEM
ForHousing were looking to reduce costs within their current contact centre solution whilst also maintaining and increasing customer satisfaction for their tenants. They have a customer service team that are extremely busy, with most tenant interactions provided through a manual process. This meant agents were handling thousands of incoming voice calls, email enquiries and webchat sessions every month, with the number of interactions continually increasing due to the pressures of Covid-19.
ForHousing have always strived to improve how they communicate with their tenants by utilising the latest digital communication technology, they recognized these technologies could help uncover more efficient ways of delivering their current services, streamline processes and reduce costs.
As with most Housing Associations, voice is still the media platform of choice, however this meant only limited services could be offered to tenants at night or at weekends. ForHousing wanted to continue offering voice but also promote new media channels such as Web Chat and expansion into social media. Providing additional channels would allow many tenants to perform self service, which after extensive research they concluded could easily handle simple questions and by following workflows they could even provide interactive responses for more in-depth processes.
ForHousing were looking for automation which could deliver the following benefits:
ForHousing recognised that the key to providing this service successfully is avoid creating a technology silo, the automation needed to integrate with wider business and communications environment (Housing Management Systems, CRM, Contact Centre) and be able to communicate across all media channels that the audience require.
THE SOLUTION
ForHousing engaged Amillan as their contact centre partner of choice, to assist with the automation project. Amillan worked with Converse360 to provide a Service Automation Platform that can deliver Web Bots, Speech Bots and Digital Humans, seamlessly integrating with the Enghouse Interactive Contact Centre Platform which was already used at ForHousing.
It was proposed to set up a dedicated Cloud based instance of this platform for an initial period of 12 months which will provide the evidence required to show the cost savings achievable whilst improving excellent customer service standards for ForHousing’s tenants. This period would also allow ForHousing to plan for the expansion of services, with potential integration into housing management and other CRM or knowledge-based systems.
THE IMPLEMENTATION
Following acceptance of the proposal ForHousing were extremely keen to progress the solution as quickly as possible and wanted to be fully involved in building the FAQ’s and Workflows for the solution. Amillan provided ForHousing with extensive user training, split over several sessions, thus making sure the ForHousing staff had the knowledge, ability, and tools to be self-sufficient to build new FAQ’s and Workflows.
The platform is based on embeds technology from the four leading conversational AI vendors; AWS, Google, IBM Watson and Microsoft, therefore if ForHousing’s requirements evolve going forward, the “Best of Breed” solution can pivot to meet the new requirements.
The training was also followed by a workshop to gather in greater detail the ForHousing requirements around colour schemes, company branding, opening, and closing statements and the general design for the ForHousing Web Bot. The name and design of the Web Bot was devised through tenant consultation and the tenants voted to call the Bot “Zippy” to give a friendly, more personable public persona to the Bot.
BUILDING WORKFLOWS
ForHousing created most of the FAQ’s and Workflows for Zippy themselves, utilising the Contact Centre team to build them. The feedback from ForHousing was that process was very easy, enabling self-sufficiency with Amillan and Converse360’s technical team on hand to assist if required. ForHousing found the Bot solution easy to build and only needed to involve the IT Department when Zippy was ready to Go Live and a simple line of code was added to ForHousing’s Web Page.
The workflows that ForHousing built cover:
TESTING
A testing instance of Zippy which was identical to the final solution was provided during implementation, this allowed ForHousing to review the look and feel before go-live. Testing itself took a couple of weeks, making sure the workflows functioned correctly and adjusting them where necessary.
THE LAUNCH
Zippy’s Go Live was on the 19th October and tenants began embracing the Web Bot’s features instantly.
Zippy has been trained to respond to enquiries across a range of topics and there are multiple workflows where the questions asked lead to additional detailed information being requested before responding.
ForHousing wanted to reduce the number of routine FAQ calls which come through from tenants to the Contact Centre and as such would point the tenants to Zippy for self-service.
ForHousing also wanted to reduce agent chat time, so when an enquiry does get through to an agent, Zippy has gathered all the relevant information and able to transfer this to the live agent, when required.
Zippy can offer the tenant the option to speak to a customer advisor at any time and should the Virtual Assistant not understand the tenants request, then Zippy will hand-off to a Live Agent to continue the conversation. If the tenant clicks the agent button the system will engage with the Contact Centre, which will look at agent availability, advise the tenant of the estimated wait time and route the chat to a live agent.
In the first week Zippy had:
THE RESULTS
Now Zippy has had time to ‘bed in’ the statistics are surpassing all expectations.
A review of the monthly statistics are as follows:
Summary of Statistics
Total Time Saved every month equates to 391 Hours or 52 Days or 2.6 Agents
The statistics show that Zippy is answering most tenants’ questions without agent involvement. As the Web Bot is being constantly trained by the ForHousing staff, Zippy will be able to answer even more questions in the future.
THE FUTURE
ForHousing have already seen the benefits of the Web Bot solution deployed, providing potential cost savings as well as the increase in customer satisfaction.
ForHousing, Amillan and Converse360 are looking to expand Zippy into Phase Two, with integration into Aareon QL, ForHousing’s housing management system. This would mean that tenants could use the Web Bot to:
ForHousing continue to seek new ways to innovate and improve their customer service with communication and automation technology. A Speech Bot version of Zippy is being considered to intelligently automate voice responses by phone. Also, ForHousing are considering other add-ons for both Web and Speech, such as the customer survey feature.
The hospital of tomorrow is already starting a “connected” revolution. In this model, the hospital acts as a smart hub.
The intelligent administration of the hospital
Connected hospitals pool and share their network resources and data. This connected trend is expanding to include medical offices, nursing homes, health professionals, and more.
Administrators are primarily concerned with network security, network performance and network maintenance, as well as the ability to connect Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices and the availability of innovative apps. Patients and visitors can benefit from in-door Location-Based Services (LBS) that provide wayfinding, geo-referencing, geolocation, and behavior analytics.
The patient room of the future
Modern, friendly and ultra-connected, patient rooms contribute to the autonomy of the care staff, while facilitating the services they provide.
For simple services, the patient no longer needs to have the care staff help them. Through an application on a tablet or smartphone, they can control their bed position, change the temperature of their room, close the curtains, order meals and more. Their touch screen controls all comfort-related applications and provides hotel-type services, while the smart healthcare network ensures that all services are delivered and secured from medical applications, such as Electronic Health Records (EHR) while sharing the same network infrastructure.
Applications already exist to automate admissions and discharge from a hospital. Now those capabilities and services are also accessible through smartphones and tablet applications. This is supported by a network infrastructure that is always available, offering reliable and effective solutions for real-time connectivity for patients, care givers and other relevant parties. This intelligent connectivity becomes the indispensable and a common link in your organization.
By qualifying the patient calls to the healthcare team, caregivers can prioritize their interventions such as a call for a glass of water, call for assistance for pain, dizziness, or distress.
This will transform the way in which patients interact with staff:
• Real-time feedback of information
• Doctors can remotely monitor patients
• Increase the frequency of information exchanges between patients and the healthcare team
• Better resource and staff management with the right resources available when and where needed and required
Location-Based Services (LBS)
A relatively new capability is Location-Based Services, using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. A LBS infrastructure is designed to provide wayfinding (indoor turn-by-turn navigation), geolocation (where am I, where is my destination) and geonotification (push messaging e.g. hand hygiene for entry/exit), as well as asset tracking, for locating people and assets:
• Simplifies the patient’s journey with self-guided navigation tools and interactive kiosks that when located in the outpatient or waiting room section, promotes dissemination of information and patient self-registration to reduce or eliminate wait times.
• Secures people and property with an intelligent alarm processing solution, able to connect events generated by an individual. A person, a sensor or connected object that staff, with the appropriate skills and nearest to the alarm, can respond.
• Enables nurses to spend more time with patients since they can reduce the amount of time looking for doctors or medical equipment
• Improves maintenance services by monitoring the medical and non-medical resources to better organize them:
• Reduce downtime of facilities or critical equipment
• Synchronize patient treatment schedules
• Improve inventory management
Innovation: People and resources in the right place at the right time
Hospitals are now setting up new Location-Based Services and solutions for people and assets. A badge provided to staff and patients helps locate them or prevents them from entering protected areas or getting lost.
A tag installed on equipment can be traced, generating a notification to the geolocation service if the equipment goes past a pre-defined zone where the equipment should not be moved to.
Crisis communication
In emergency scenarios where real-time communication and collaboration is key, the hospital will be able to synchronize all elements of its organization to provide an optimal response with:
• Mobilization of teams
• Internal and external communications
• Management of beds and rooms
• Internal patient transportation
• Location of medical equipment
• Setup of impromptu/temporary triage areas (indoor or outdoor)
A complete network connected throughout your region
Innovative, integrated hotel-type services from application partners facilitate admissions and discharges from hospitals. This provides access to hotel-like guest services such as VOD through a smartphone / tablet application.
Amillan delivers market leading solutions from Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) to supporting a single network infrastructure, secured by unified user/device policy management, with IoMT identification, onboarding, enablement and containment, all supported by a single network management system (on premise or in the cloud), that provides full configuration, management and control of a hospital network, complete with network and application analytics to fine-tune network performance. ALE is also working on an IoT Gateway that standardizes interfaces for the many protocols used by different subsystems such as home automation, IoT SigFox or LoRa, MQTT, and facilitating their integration through Alcatel-Lucent Rainbow.
ALE provides a unique solution with OmniAccess Stellar Location-Based Services (LBS) for wayfinding, geolocation and geonotification and is working on a BLE based asset tracking solution for people and assets with open APIs for application development.
A badge provided to staff as well as patients can be used to locate them and prevent them from entering protected areas or getting lost. A tag is installed on the equipment to be traced, such that when it passes near a receiver, its position is updated on a floorplan map by the asset tracking service.
ALE telephones also integrate Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) function to enrich the “mesh” and improve the geolocation accuracy.
Hospitals supported by technological innovations are future focused and place high importance on the well-being of both users and healthcare professionals. Tomorrow’s progressive hospital is being built today.
Connectivity is spearheading this transition, moving from concept to realization and generalization.
Contact Amillan today to start your journey towards the hospital of the future.
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