SACYL, a public health services agency in northwest Spain, has deployed contact center and speech-enabled customer communications technologies from CosmoCom to better serve the 2.5 million constituents in the Castilla and Leon regions of Spain. The on-demand solution was deployed by CosmoCom partner Telefonica, a Spanish broadband and telecommunications provider in Europe and Latin America.

With 14 hospitals, 241 health centers, and 3,650 local clinics under its umbrella, SACYL receives nearly 20 million calls per year. To fulfill its customers' needs and provide live communications around the clock, SACYL developed an e-healthy strategy. Its plan involves an automated appointment system with speech-enabled technology. Not only does the self-service implementation reduce the number of calls, but the unified platform allows agents to serve callers in a more efficient manner.  

The highly customized SACYL solution supports virtual call center sites and remote teleworkers. This means that call center agents can connect to the platform from anywhere with an Internet connection. Central to the upgrade is the appointment scheduling technology that will eliminate the long waits in the call queue. "Improving accessibility to primary care for our citizens became our first and foremost mission," said Jesus Garcia Cruces, director general of health department at SACYL, in a statement. Since the roll-out, SACYL reports positive feedback and a dramatic reduction in wait times. 

"One of the attractions of the CosmoCom solution to a sophisticated customer is the ease of integration and customization," says Steve Kaish, vice president of product management at CosmoCom. "Integration can be achieved quickly and inexpensively, often in hours rather than days, or in days rather than weeks or months." This, in turns, allows businesses to quickly respond to unpredictable and complex business challenges, which in the healthcare industry can be life-changing.” 

Healthcare is CosmoCom’s second-largest vertical, comprising nearly 20 percent of its total business. Kaish says he expects that percentage to grow in coming years. CosmoCom’s largest vertical remains information and communication technologies, (ICT), with other major verticals including banking and financial services, utilities, tele-services, and government.

According to SACYL, to get full mileage out of the solution, the agency plans to consider and deploy additional technologies that plug into the CosmoCom platform. Although Kaish notes that the healthcare industry has historically been slow to adapt to new technologies and innovations, he sees that changing. "Healthcare operations have strict data security requirements, often prohibiting even one division from seeing data from a sister division," Kaish explains. "CosmoCom’s multitenant capabilities and flexible security permission enable multiple divisions to be hosted on a single platform, while only sharing data within the entities that require sharing."