For those who have reached a more advanced age, life is much different from what it was in the younger years. Seniors often struggle with many of life's simplest tasks, and in turn, often require a bit of extra help just to get through a day, some more so than others. But that's where services like Medical Alert come into play, and even services like these can use some of that same extra help that said services provide to make operations as efficient and helpful as possible. So when Medical Alert needed its own extra help, it turned to Five9 (News - Alert), whose corporate contact center capabilities offered extra power for users in the field.

While Medical Alert—part of Connect America—offers a personal emergency monitoring service that uses personal emergency monitoring devices to give seniors access to emergency service that is not only easy to use, but also goes with said seniors where it's needed most at the time, the company turned to Five9 to help ensure it could provide that emergency service quickly and effectively. Thus Medical Alert brought in Five9's corporate contact center systems, which allowed Medical Alert's team of 350 agents to better handle the sheer number of inbound calls it gets monthly, a number described as being in the “tens of thousands.” Plus, with the corporate contact system, Medical Alert could better make the substantial number of outbound calls that it needs to make as well.

Medical Alert's senior director of enterprise systems, Joe Huffnagle, described the impact that bringing in the Five9 system had for Medical Alert's operations, saying “With a hosted solution like Five9, we could push everything to the cloud and focus on our business—instead of having to scale up hardware and infrastructure.” Further, Medical Alert also got access to a variety of useful new features, including the ability to rapidly scale operations upward as needed, the ability to better tap a remote workforce—including allowing agents the ability to work from home—and being able to reduce costs accordingly throughout the enterprise by taking advantage of better efficiency and productivity. The average call length time also decreased, and Medical Alert could generate new sales on top of it, allowing for increased overall revenue.

Indeed, Medical Alert has summed up the biggest benefit of using a cloud call center: since it's commonly operated as a subscription service, users can get in on the service and its accompanying offerings for a fixed rate, making it a recurring, manageable expense. While not every company prefers to go this route—some like the benefits inherent in having all the necessary components to the system on the grounds and under the firm's direct control—those like Medical Alert can find a lot of benefit in letting someone else do the heavy lifting as far as the infrastructure goes. Medical Alert can easily change the scale of the operation as circumstances warrant—up to a certain point, of course—and doesn't have to be particularly worried about buying too much capacity for the need. Sure, there's some potential of getting “locked in”, depending on when the service in question does its billing, but that's the kind of thing that changes with individual providers.

The end result here, however, is that Five9 delivered just the kind of service that Medical Alert needed, and with a graying population in the United States and beyond, Medical Alert may be in just the position needed to make some great things happen for itself and for its target market.