SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 1, 2016) -  ENT and Allergy Associates, LLP (ENTA), the nation's most prominent ear, nose, throat, allergy and audiology practice, fully understands the importance of being available to answer and respond to patient telephone inquiries of all kinds, from appointment requests to prescription refills. Despite the practice's continuing expansion, ENTA wanted to achieve its goal of one-minute or less wait time by rapidly pairing patients with appropriately skilled agents.

ENTA deployed Avaya Contact Center Solution (ACCS) from Avaya to support its fast-growing call center operations. ACCS provides ENTA with:

• A collaborative voice and multimedia call center solution that's an extension of its phone system, Avaya IP Office.
• Essential skills-based routing, as well as call recording and multimedia call-handling to help serve customers in the way they prefer. 
• Changes on the fly. As call volumes shift, ENTA staff can make changes to ACCS and shift agents to appointment setting duties when demand is high.
• Real-time visual reporting with Avaya Agent Map to help identify gaps and opportunities to reduce wait and talk time on each call.

As part of the solution, ENTA created a Patient Rapid Response Center (PRRC) with a dedicated staff of 70+ representatives ready to fulfill the Practice's "Call Us Today, See Us Today®" pledge. Today, more than 30 offices are routed through PRRC with five different options for incoming callers, which meant the Practice must always be ready to accommodate at least 150 incoming call variations. With a volume of up to 10,000 calls per day and call volumes fluctuating by day of week, time of day and even by cold and flu season, it was imperative they got it right.

Today, ENTA is connecting most callers with an agent in 1-2 minutes. ENTA is currently planning to bring 10 additional offices onto the call center, raising daily volume to between 12,000 and 14,000 calls. To help manage the load, PRRC plans to add texting and email as additional options for patients to contact PRRC -- all possible through ACCS. The Practice will also use outbound calling to return calls automatically after patients have left voicemail messages.

John Monreal, director of the Patient Rapid Response Center, commented: "Coming from the travel industry, where the wait time is closer to 10 minutes, I can tell you our response time is phenomenal. We're very proud of our metrics."

Read full case study here.

About Avaya
Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premises and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. Avaya's fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.

Certain statements contained in this press release may be forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "should" or "will" or other similar terminology. We have based these forward-looking statements on our current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While we believe these are reasonable, such forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. These and other important factors may cause our actual results to differ materially from any future results expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. For a list and description of such risks and uncertainties, please refer to Avaya's filings with the SEC that are available at www.sec.gov. Avaya disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

All trademarks identified by ®, TM, or SM are registered marks, trademarks, and service marks, respectively, of Avaya Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners

Follow Avaya on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, and the Avaya Connected Blog.