Assisting the organisation achieve its mission to support its clients in crisis
Reduction in calls unanswered from 50% to effectively zero
Centralised management and visibility across a federated environment
Detailed, customised reporting enabling continuous operational improvement
Established more than 50 years ago to address the specific medical needs of Victorian indigenous communities, the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service (VAHS) has expanded steadily to provide a comprehensive range of medical, dental and social services for its community. It currently has 300 staff supporting more than 14,000 clients. VAHS is also committed to supporting the community’s well-being by assisting research into its ongoing needs and through contributions to community events and activities. VAHS operates from five locations in Victoria, as well as a 24/7 free and confidential counselling helpline for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
VAHS had been operating with an IP-based PABX at its original two clinics in the Melbourne suburbs of Preston and Fitzroy. This system was difficult to administer, requiring support from VAHS’s service provider for every change.
"Our ability to respond is really important, because people's lives are at stake – but we were providing a really poor service because we didn't have an adequate phone system. We were missing 50% of our calls. It was a terrible service"
The appointment of Advance Vision Technology (AVTech) as its managed services provider was a catalyst for change.
“We really needed to increase our IT capabilities, but we found that the companies we were working with just weren't able to deliver it. We changed to AVTech, who are fabulous and respond to every need we have. We really value our relationship with AVTech,” said Brown.
Opening a new clinic and launching a crisis helpline
With plans to open a third clinic, VAHS decided to trial a cloud phone system for 20 staff at that new site. VAHS selected RingCentral’s RingEX cloud-based unified communications platform, based on a recommendation from AVTech.
The trial was a success, but RingCentral’s full value emerged supporting a service launched by VAHS in mid-2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 lockdowns had seen many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people without access to their family and other supports, including face-to-face access to workers from Aboriginal services, leaving many feeling vulnerable and isolated.
VAHS launched its Yarning SafeNStrong crisis helpline (1800 959 563) with a team of 16 counsellors, mostly working from home in regional Victoria. The statewide helpline not only focused on the social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal Victorians, but also acted as an emergency response line to provide assistance with health, family violence, housing, and legal services.
While the new clinic and crisis helpline were operating successfully on RingCentral, this system was not federated or integrated with the legacy telephony at VAHS’s original two clinics. The barrier in migrating all sites to RingCentral was the cost to upgrade more than 200 end-of-life and incompatible handsets, so AVTech and RingCentral organised for these two sites to be upgraded to Avaya Cloud Office® by RingCentral (ACO) with Avaya at the time offering bundled J139 IP phones as part of the upgrade to not-for-profit organisations.
Implementing Contact Centre for medical reception
VAHS also implemented an integrated RingCentral Contact Centre to manage calls to its high volume medical, dental and allied health services. In addition to having dedicated agents to answer these calls, VAHS uses RingCentral’s callback feature for clients to choose and maintain their place in the queue.
"We never miss a call now. The RingCentral dashboard shows me that everyone who requests a callback gets called back."
VAHS has federated the ACO and RingCentral platforms, giving all VAHS users access to full enterprise telephony and e-fax features from anywhere. The organisation has centralised visibility across the entire telephony environment, providing management with detailed analytics and insights into call volumes and call flows, length of contact with clients, how each clinic’s reception team is managing its calls, and more.
“We’ve got all the data we need at our fingertips. We're very data-driven in a lot of areas. We look at how we're travelling, and if we see there are starting to be some gaps, we can address it. We can do anything with those RingCentral reports” said Brown.
As part of its managed service to VAHS, AVTech has a full-time on-site systems engineer to support the IT environment and the administration of the RingCentral platform, including contact centre configuration changes, assigning extensions and configuring and rolling out handsets to new employees.
“We do all the administration ourselves now, and no longer have to wait for a specialist telephony service provider to make any changes, or pay any additional service charges to do it” said Phuah.
“The biggest change for us has been the quality of the service from RingCentral and AVTech, their ability to respond to our needs, and understanding how we operate and what we need,” said Brown.
“We’re talking about unwell people in crisis. Waiting on the phone for 20 minutes feels like a lifetime. Telephony was one of the hardest systems to reform at VAHS and, seriously, I couldn’t be happier. Now people aren’t waiting in the abyss,” he concluded.