While Supporting Business Operations
Avaya and its business partners have responded quickly to the unexpected outbreak of COVID-19, donating remote consultation video systems and remote visiting systems to frontline hospitals in China, helping slow and control the epidemic, meeting the visiting needs of patients’ relatives, and providing protection for medical staff.
Avaya has also focused on ensuring the operation of its customers’ businesses, including remote/home agent solutions to maintain stable operations, while continuing to provide high levels of customer experience.
Meeting the health care challenge
Soon after the COVID-19 epidemic was reported, Avaya began its efforts to support healthcare providers in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak. Avaya teamed with partners to donate communication systems to Huoshenshan Hospital and Leishenshan Hospital, completing development to delivery within 48 hours. Avaya and its partner Shanghai Zhiang also donated remote visiting systems to other facilities, including Tongxiang Hospital, a unit of Zhejiang Province People’s Hospital.
Avaya’s Tongxiang Hospital solution enables patients and families outside the isolation zone to engage in two-way audio and video calls through a customized video conferencing application, enabling a “human touch” while preventing contamination. The solution also enables more frequent communication between healthcare staff and patients, and reduces the risks to healthcare staff.
Ahead of the deployment, Avaya sent two teams of engineers to the hospital for commissioning and training. They wound up redeveloping the hospital’s network to accommodate the ICU ward’s medical applications as well as the new remote visitation application. The solution now enables point-to-point high-definition audio and video communication between the isolation ward and the visiting area through a local area network.
Supporting customer service
As the COVID-19 outbreak began to pose challenges for customer service agents, Avaya began providing home agent solutions to avoid cross-infection, protect the health of employees, and ensure the daily operation of contact centers.
One example is Hainan Airlines and its holding subsidiaries, which operate more than 1,800 domestic and international routes, covering Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania. Such a large airline network is naturally wholly dependent on the functioning of its customer service department and the health of its agents.
For example, Hainan Airlines deployed a remote home agent solution based on Avaya’s IX Workplace and IX Contact Center technology. The airline migrated its original customer service system to employees’ homes and mobile terminals to enable remote access and continue providing services to passengers.
Realizing the severity of the outbreak, the airline selected a suite of Avaya remote agent solutions, with customer calls routed automatically to an outbound connection that links the agent’s office number to his or her mobile phone number or landline. Business systems could be securely accessed with remote Teamview solutions, ensuring that customer requests could be carried out as expected. This was all wrapped up in a three-dimensional, closed-loop communication network.
With the epidemic spreading, Avaya and Hainan Airlines entered into a race against time to get the system up and running and fully operational as soon as possible. With its partner, Shenzhen Digital Technology Co., Avaya was able to implement the new system in just five days. This involved installing a large number of agents’ remote computer operating systems, configuration of soft phones, quality inspection, installing screen-recording software, business software, testing, and fixing any issues. The aim was to ensure that agents could undertake all customer service tasks from home in a timely manner, enabling them to continue providing the highest quality services for passengers and users.
Today, Avaya continues to monitor the worldwide COVID-19 epidemic with an assistance team available to provide guidance as to where the company could help in any direction in the future. IAUG members salute Avaya for its rapid and effective response to this international health crisis.
