Caring For You exceeds pandemic demands and grows business with Zoom

Caring For You is an award-winning nursing agency with more than 8,000 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.

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 Caring for You, “a really smart and quick changeover.”

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, Caring for You said. 

Managing 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’s features made it possible to configure a level of geographic redundancy for the agency’s phone services, meaning that Caring for You “always felt confident in the Plan B they 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,” Caring for You 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.”

The new way to meet customers where they are

Spread across the three locations, Caring For You relies on Zoom Contact Center to route calls, balance the call load between agents, and provide deeper insights into the team’s performance. The Allocations department can see the number of average call times, wait queues, completed engagements, interactions, and a client’s contact information to quickly learn who a client spoke with, and when.

“The reporting is absolutely amazing. You can see all the incoming data, live, and use the technology to improve the agent experience to make it more fair and easier to work,” Caring for You said. “It helps us deliver more personalised service.”

This new ability to monitor and measure interactions translates into greater efficiency and a better experience for both agents and customers.

While phone is their primary communications channel, Caring For You knows some clients prefer web chats or SMS, making Zoom’s omnichannel contact center a scalable solution for the long-term. 

“We want to go where our customers’ needs are and not force them on a channel,” Caring for You said. “With Zoom Contact Center, we can receive calls and talk with clients over multiple channels, all in the same interface, without having to learn three different software programs.”

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 Caring for You.

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,” Caring for You said.

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. 

“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,” Caring for You 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,” Caring for You said.

The Zoom platform effect

As an organisation built around helping others, Caring For You uses the convenience of Zoom’s all-in-one communications and collaboration platform to help create a more relaxed atmosphere for agents to serve their clients. Rather than waste time toggling back and forth between applications, the agents have immediate access to internal help as well as the ability to communicate with clients simultaneously.

Looking ahead, Caring For You is excited to have a collaboration platform in place that can scale as the organisation grows and sustain the pace of rapid innovation.