Over 10 years ago Silver Chain set up a small customer centre to help centralise incoming calls and to provide better access to their staff and clients.

 

In 2006 the Customer Operations Centre adopted an 'innovative' gateway model; a centralised communication portal for rural, remote and metropolitan services, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Customer Operations Centre allows easier access to referrals and screenings for services, data management  and service instruction, accommodating over 80 health and community programs.

 

The essence of this model is to enable our direct care staff to focus on providing services in the community and for clients to get access to Silver Chain services at anytime of the day or night.

 

Silver Chain is now a recognised national leader in Customer Service and is helping other health and community providers to initiate this model within their organisations, both in WA and interstate.

 

Every call at the Silver Chain Customer Operations centre is answered by a genuine and caring person. We have been able to achieve this with the help of our Tunstall's CareLink Alarm Service partners in Queensland, who take our overflow calls.

 

The Customer Operations Centre utilises state of the art technologies and has 130-140 highly experienced, well trained, caring team members available to offer assistance at any time of the day.

 

Each year more than 1.5 million customer activities are carried out for any one of our 80,000 clients, staff, volunteers, carers or service providers entering, utilising or exiting our services.

 

 

In 2008 Silver Chain Customer Operations Centre is representing Australia as a recognised international finalist within the Customer Contact industry. The Silver Chain Customer Operations Centre has recognised as a finalist in the Best Contact Centre 51-249 agents category, along with four other representatives from Australia, Japan and Indonesia in the Asia-Pacific region.

 

In 2007 Silver Chain was awarded the Australian Teleservices Association Best Teleservices Centre in WA 50-120fte at the annual excellence awards, amongst a competitive field. Silver Chain then represented Western Australia as National Finalists in Sydney.

 

The Customer Service Council (CSC) of Western Australia carries out independant assessments on service centres as part of their annual award system. This process involves a 'mystery shopper', a submission and also a presentation to the Council and Chairperson. Silver Chain were named as the Category (Health and Community Sector) and Overall winners for the 2007 Customer Service Excellence Award for Outstanding Achievement.

 

The Award recognises Silver Chain's innovative, centralised Contact/ Customer Operations Gateway Model that accomodates 40 locations across the state, over 80,000 clients, staff, service providers, carers and others, carries out  175,000 - 180,000 customer activities per month, to people accessing any one of the 86 Silver Chain services 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

 

Ben Oxford, Manager Customer Operations, who is also a Director with the CCMA, with his support managers Chris Lejmanoski, Geraldine Harris, Janice Bodman and Lesley Jones, recieved the Large Business Category Award for Service Excellence and Innovation at a gala CSC event.