Serving customers

"We are assessed [by our clients] on the basis of how we actually respond to our callers, how we manage the cases, and how we follow through to meet their expectations," says Baker.

Say, for example, a Korean-speaking client wakes up in his hotel room in Yangon, Myanmar, feeling unwell. He hardly speaks English. But he nevertheless telephones the local alarm centre. International SOS's agents in total speak 70 languages across its global network. If this centre does not have a Korean-speaking person on duty, the agent will route the call to an alarm centre in Korea or any centre where at a Korean-speaking medical professional - nurse or paramedic - is on duty. The agent has ways of identifying the caller or the company he/she works for, thus knowing that this person is probably Korean.

Say, in the opinion of the Korean-speaking professional, the caller's condition is serious. He will route the call to the most suitably-qualified Korean-speaking doctor in the International SOS team. Now, say, this doctor decides to evacuate the caller to the nearest international-standard hospital, which, in this instance, is in Bangkok, Thailand. The Bangkok alarm centre will now be instantly activated. This doctor also wants his patient to be evacuated by air ambulance. But the nearest available air ambulance is in Singapore. So, now, the Singapore alarm centre is activated. All these alerts and activations mean that each of the alarm centres have to be aware of what the other is doing. And all this is possible because International SOS's information and communications technology network is tightly integrated and connected. "The alarm centres are the core component of our business," Baker explains. "We're ICT-focused, rather than just IT-focused," he adds.

The three pillars

"We have implemented three critical business applications into our alarm centres," Baker says. This comprises a CRM solution, an application that helps International SOS staff to quickly formulate a response to a client's problem or query, and a structured database. "Our CRM deployment is built around an Onyx solution." This application contains information on International SOS's entire membership base. "This solution helps us determine a caller's eligibility, the service level that a caller is entitled to, how this service is to be provided, and so on."

International SOS members each receive a membership card, on which the phone numbers of all the alarm centres and the holder's membership number are printed. This number enables an agent to identify the organisation to which a caller belongs. With this number, an agent is also able to extract information he needs about the caller, from the CRMCRM system. For some clients, International SOS provides dedicated inbound phone numbers to selected alarm centres. This enables an alarm centre agent to instantly identify the organisation to which the caller belongs. "We have bolted in-house applications - membership, billing, etc. - onto this Onyx solution. This CRM solution is integrated into our central application, the CASE management system(see below), which has been developed in-house as well." Alles zu CRM auf CIO.de