Caring For You exceeds pandemic demands and grows business with Zoom

Caring For You is an award-winning nursing agency with over 5,550 members working nationally across private and public healthcare. Founded by registered nurse and midwife, Louise Thomson, and now run by her daughters Grace and Belle Thomson, care is at the heart of this business in both name and practice.

Business analyst Torben Wick first turned to Zoom as a means of simplifying operations.“I don’t like to do repetitive tasks” he said. “The moment I saw Zoom, I thought: here’s something that’s going to make my life easier.”

Professional tools for external communication

As an award-winning provider of healthcare staff, Caring For You was catapulted into a period of rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Training internal staff, onboarding nurses in rural locations, and adopting a remote working model were just some of the challenges they were able to overcome by using Zoom as a business-wide communications platform.

Zoom Phone provided reliable and scalable solutions for meeting client-facing obligations. Switching to cloud-based PBX was, according to Torben, “a really smart and quick changeover.”

Torben Wick

As demand increased and incoming calls exceeded the agency’s capability, they reached out to their Zoom Customer Success Team, who were able to propose product solutions to meet the agency’s needs. This enabled the agency’s Allocations Department to not only survive the pandemic but to thrive.

Zoom Phone solutions are well-suited for businesses seeking to provide national coverage in Australia. The Caring For You agency has now been able to open an additional Allocations Department focusing on capturing local calls in Newcastle, NSW. With Zoom Phone’s cloud PBX system, the agency can also divert phone traffic to its other office locations as required to meet fluctuating inbound calling demands. “If there’s too much traffic, they can easily move it to the head office, Torben said. “If nothing happens in Newcastle, they can pick up the traffic from head office.”

With up to 2,000 daily incoming calls, reliability was a key factor for the Caring For You agency in choosing a communications solution. Zoom Phone features made it possible to configure a level of geographic redundancy for the agency’s phone services, meaning that Torben “always felt confident in the Plan B I could set up with Zoom.”

As a nursing agency, the ability to be able to quickly move to a plan B so that staff can continue to answer phones when an office faces outages is vital.

“We once lost electricity for 6 hours at head office,” Torben said. “Because we have offices across the country and people working from home, we moved the entire traffic to others in the organisation who were able to pick up the phone and keep allocating shifts. Zoom gives us a really quick Plan B.”

Protecting team culture in a hybrid working environment

Maintaining an inclusive and caring culture is a priority for the agency, and connecting face-to-face via Zoom Meetings is a daily activity. “Booking meetings is as efficient as it gets,” said Torben, a big fan of spontaneous meeting requests.

With few officially scheduled meetings, fluidity between Zoom Meetings, Zoom Rooms, and Zoom Team Chat is great for emulating office environments. “The status bubble so that you know if someone is available … it’s like a door shut or open,” Torben said. “I love that you can just move from a quick call and elevate the conversation to a video meeting if necessary.”

Simultaneous use of Zoom Team Chat and Zoom Phone has improved customer service by allowing continuous communication around customers’ accounts between staff, all in the background. Additionally, Zoom Webinars have been an integral part of both internal and external training.

“With features like screen-share, annotate, and remote screen control, we found that we could train someone pretty much as well as we would sitting next to them,” Torben said.

Prior to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the agency’s staff would usually fly in from various locations for in-person training, but with border closures in place, it simply wasn’t possible. “If we didn’t have a solution like Zoom, we couldn’t have on-boarded people in remote areas or different states. Now we’re pretty much able to hire and train nationwide,” Torben said.

The Zoom platform effect

By incorporating apps like 10to8 from the Zoom App Marketplace and using features like Outlook calendar integration, Torben has configured the organisation’s Zoom platform to suit the agency’s specific needs.

Data analysis is a key feature of the Zoom Phone Pro Power Pack add-on that enables Torben (as an account administrator) to manage costs and monitor productivity.

“Everything is visual which means I don’t need to dig too far into lines of data. … I only have to build my KPI report once and refresh it with fresh data,” Torben said.

“I can also see really quickly the pattern of calls by time and day, which means I can staff really precisely. I would pick up in a heartbeat if I was understaffed.”

By embracing Zoom as a core communications platform, Caring For You has improved efficiency, streamlined operations, and onboarded internal and external staff across Australia, all whilst protecting their caring culture and maintaining face-to-face connections.