Case Study
Healthcare Call Center
Cleo’s Transaction Processing Software helps a healthcare organization transition to hosted IVR through Qwest.
One of the largest non-for-profit health plans in the United States, is composed of health plans, foundation hospitals, and medical groups. As an integrated health delivery system, they provide and coordinate the entire scope of care. They serve 8.2 million members, and as a non-for-profit agency, are driven by the needs of their members. The organization’s member call center handles a high volume of calls per day.
The Challenge
To handle incoming calls efficiently, the company needed to add a solution that would reduce call center loading. As they were outsourcing the hosting and development of their IVR applications, they wanted to invest in a SOA communications solution to support several IVR platforms that are geographically dispersed. The existing patient scheduling application also needed to be rewritten to take advantage of speech recognition and to eliminate the proprietary solution on aging IVR platforms. They decided that the best way to meet the communication requirements was to use Cleo’s Transaction-based Processing.
The Solution
The organization outsourced the IVR applications development to Accenture and the hosting operations to Qwest. Accenture selected Cleo's Transaction Processing for the mainframe 3270 access due to its ease of use and fifteen years of IVR communications experience. They did not have extensive 3270 screen scraping experience, and Transaction Processing was an efficient way to solve the problem. Qwest is required to provide high availability in their SLA’s and Cleo's dynamic failover capabilities, along with automatic session recovery, played a key part in their decision to use Transaction Processing.
The Transaction Processing Suite is comprised of the Transaction Designer and the Transaction Processor. The Transaction Designer is a Windows development tool used to create transactions (e.g. Get_Last_Appointment) using 3270 screens. Transaction Designer records the screens, provides testing and validation functions and publishes the transactions for the run time Transaction Processor.
Transaction Processor processes the transactions in real time, and manages all host sessions, performs automatic session recovery and supports dynamic failover for hardware failures. Transaction Processor also includes a Web-based Administration GUI that provides a Configuration, Logging, and an Administration tool.
In summary, selecting Cleo's Transaction Processing solution reduced development time and provided the operational capabilities to enable Qwest to agree to meet the service levels.
The Solution at Work
The complete solution will have 220 incoming lines from five GVP platforms, located in several cities. Each GVP platform can direct calls to either of two data centers. Each data center has two Cleo Servers to support the dynamic failover capabilities.
If your customers are deploying new IVR applications that need mainframe data, contact Cleo to help you with the RFP responses, network configurations or any other network questions.