MDA partners with Vocus & QPC to cloudify their comms.
MDA National is an Australia-wide Medical Defence Organisation (MDO). For over 90 years, MDA National has been trusted by doctors to provide outstanding member support and extensive professional indemnity insurance.
Owned by members, for members, they are always there to support doctors when they need them, and their interests comes first. They exist solely to protect their members at every stage of their career, and promote good medical practice throughout Australia.
When MDA National’s members contact the company, they need help quickly and efficiently. As a member-facing organisation with offices throughout Australia, the company’s IT infrastructure and applications, like its telephony systems and email platform, are key to much of the work they do. MDA National prides themself on offering personalised, compassionate care to each of their members, so their infrastructure and applications need to meet their mission, especially during a worldwide pandemic when our health professionals need an increased level of support.
About MDA National
For over 90 years, MDA National has been trusted by doctors to provide outstanding member support and extensive professional indemnity insurance.
Owned by members, for members, MDA National is always there to support doctors when they need advice and their interests come first. MDA National exists solely to protect its members at every stage of their career and promote good medical practice throughout Australia.
MDA National prides itself on offering personalised, compassionate care to each of its members. No matter how big or small your concern – MDA National is there to support them, so they can keep providing outstanding patient care.
About Vocus
Vocus helps enterprises and governments do more, go further, grow faster. Through Vocus’ expertise, brilliant network, and unique customer focus, it makes brilliant solutions simple for enterprise and government organisations.
Backed by a team of leading network experts, solution architects, dedicated account teams, and strategic partners, Vocus’ carrier-grade network extends across Australia and into Asia Pacific.
Vocus also works with the best available wholesale fibre networks to deliver the right solutions for customers, whether that be in cities, regional and remote areas, or international locations.
More than 5,000 organisations have made the switch to Vocus, including more than 200 government agencies and nearly two-thirds of the ASX 200.
The Challenge: upgrading old technology
MDA National was looking to update its on-premise telephony system to better serve its member base, but they didn’t realise it would be needed sooner than planned. The decision to implement a cloud-based contact centre to replace their existing legacy infrastructure was required as they had “reached a point where maintenance and currency of the old system required a lot of investment to keep it up-to-date and there was an associated risk,” said Nick Stott, Information, Communications and Technology Manager.
When the pandemic forced MDA National’s employees to work remotely, they were still using their legacy system. Offices needed to be shut down before a new contact centre solution could be implemented. “Our on-prem solution didn’t enable remote access of any kind,” stated Stott. This was a massive disruption for an organisation that’s reliant upon its members contacting their team during critical circumstances. “We had to quickly implement an intermediary workaround to allow people to work from home, and Vocus helped us do that.”
A new cloud-first strategy had already been developed which included a number of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, “but our existing architecture no longer lent itself to a cloud-first service delivery. Someone in Sydney trying to reach AWS in Sydney would have to first traverse into Perth to then get back into Sydney. That wouldn’t have worked for us once we started adding in highdefinition video conferencing.” explained Stott.
The Solution: Genesys Cloud CX
Once the decision had been made for MDA to move on from their legacy PBX solution, a number of vendors were considered and upon consultation with existing partner Vocus, they agreed that the Genesys Cloud CX solution met all their requirements. For MDA National, Vocus’ consultative approach helped them feel confident with the chosen solution. “We’re not an easy customer to keep happy,” admitted Stott. “We tend to change focus quite rapidly and have a predisposition to spend too much time planning, and then trying to rush through a service delivery. Roberta, our account manager at Vocus, was amazing. With her help, we changed that trajectory.”
QPC in Partnership with Vocus provided the Genesys Cloud CX platform which provides a cloud-based contact centre and enterprise telephony solution, built on a micro-services architecture within AWS. A true all-in-one unified experience across the business which included, but was not limited to: Voice, Chat, Call-backs, Scripting, Video Conferencing, Instant Messaging, etc.
“Working in partnership with Vocus to transition MDA National to Genesys Cloud CX ensured we had top talent across each organisation to deliver the extensive solution they required. The QPC team really enjoyed working on this project and look forward to engaging with Vocus on future opportunities” stated Peter Levine, Commercial Director at QPC.
“The requirements were well documented and everyone I dealt with was an expert in their field. They were patient, and dealt with an evolving requirement list.” QPC knew their product inside out, it was impressive. They understood what we were trying to achieve and helped us get there.” said Stott.
“Working in partnership with Vocus to transition MDA National to Genesys Cloud CX ensured we had top talent across each organisation to deliver the extensive solution they required. The QPC team really enjoyed working on this project and look forward to engaging with Vocus on future opportunities”
The Benefits
Since the Genesys Cloud CX contact centre was implemented, the benefits for MDA National were immediate.
There was no impact on doctors’ ability to work with MDA National – to them, it appeared simply as ‘business as usual’, which protected MDA National’s reputation as a leading insurer of medical indemnity and resolved a potentially major issue which could have caused doctors to reconsider their choice of indemnity provider.
The move to SaaS also underscored the importance of connectivity for Stott and his team. “We now have a mobile workforce as we’ve moved to SaaS-based services, connectivity interoffice has been crucial. Without robust networking and security, we’d have our hands tied as to what we can achieve,” stated Stott.
With the pandemic requiring MDA National’s workforce to continue operations from remote locations, the Genesys Cloud CX solution implemented by QPC provides the same experience as in the office, with the added benefit of much more functionality than in their previous telephony system.
According to MDA National, the features available to them in Genesys Cloud CX provide a strong roadmap for improvement of customer service. It will enable them to implement omnichannel communication easily in the future. For example, they could integrate all their interaction channels with their customer relationship management software. This would mean all customer interactions – whether by web chat, telephony, speech recognition of calls, SMS or email – could be logged in one place, providing a holistic view of a customer’s touchpoints.