Fenway Health switches over 600 employees to remote work

Fenway Health is a federally qualified community health center located in Boston, with a staff of over 600 spread out across 15 locations. Each year, tens of thousands of patients sign up with them—which you can imagine puts a lot of demand on their customer support and IT staff.

At first, Fenway Health’s solution for keeping their customer support team up with the growing customer demand was to add on to their PBX solution. After all, it was working up until that point, why not just add a few more applications to get the features they needed?

That… didn’t exactly work as planned. Eventually, the PBX solution became a clunky amalgamation of application suites, each one needing separate analytics, and every new app made it more difficult to keep adding more on. Plus, the more they added to it, the more exponentially expensive it got each month.

Jon DiBiasio, IT Director at Fenway Health, knew it was time to change things up. They needed to move away from physical phones, and switch to something that was easier to use, flexible, and could scale with their growth (and a predictable monthly price would be nice as well).

A flexible + scalable platform that’s designed for remote work

Jon decided to make the switch to Dialpad's healthcare phone system, and soon enough, Fenway Health began rolling it out across the company’s many locations. Now, they no longer need to switch between multiple apps when they’re talking to patients and booking appointments. Everything the agents needed was all in one place.

Plus, it made onboarding and training much easier. After all, it’s a lot easier to learn to use a single app than to try and learn several at once. Even better: the reduced training time means it’s easier for Fenway Health to customize the training for each of their clinics and departments.

When a new agent joins Fenway, they’re given custom training playlists that include how-to guides and onboarding.

Now, it’s safe to say that nothing is quite as nerve-wracking as having the manager standing right behind you while you’re trying to work.

Well, the good news for Fenway’s agents is that with Dialpad, the managers are still there to assist new agents and help them get started, but they can remotely listen in on calls instead, which isn’t nearly as nerve-wracking. (For starters, they don’t have to hear the manager literally breathing down their necks.) Oh, and the managers can still jump in when necessary to provide customized training support and feedback. In fact, training is better than ever.

Work doesn’t have to be a place you go

Now, Fenway Health’s agents don’t even need physical desk phones any more. With Dialpad, everything can be accessed over the Internet, whether through a mobile app, desktop app, or any web browser:

Now, they can work from anywhere.

As an added bonus, Fenway Health no longer has to worry about real estate. As they expanded to more call centers, that required more offices to work from. “Real estate in Boston isn’t the easiest to come by,” says Jon. “With Dialpad, we realized that we don’t need all that space or cubicles to hire staff.”

Well, cubicles are no longer required. In fact, neither is extra office space.

Analytics: the diagnosis for a call center’s health

With Fenway Health’s old PBX system, getting contact center analytics were difficult, to say the least. The multiple applications each had different analytics, and putting the disparate pieces of data together to get something actionable was like solving a jigsaw puzzle made by mixing up three different sets.

With Dialpad, the data is just there, sorted, and easy to analyze. They can see everything from average call time to how many times a call gets forwarded, all from a single clean interface:

If a call center is getting overwhelmed, they can see on a heat map that and adjust their staff accordingly. In fact, that data helped drive the decision for Fenway Health to get a new dedicated call center, and the improvement was huge.

“The remote transition was seamless… Our service levels were unaffected.”

Fenway Health switched to Dialpad in 2019, and the agents began adapting to the remote work options quickly. At the time, they had no idea how helpful that would be just a year later.

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic made working remotely necessary. While some of Fenway Health’s workforce had to keep working from the office (after all, it’s hard to take care of patients over video), about 70 to 80 percent of the workforce had to go home.

While many organizations had to figure out how to move entire workstations, Fenway’s switch was a little less cumbersome. They literally just handed headsets out to employees as they were leaving the office, then started working remotely the next day. All in all, they lost exactly zero minutes of productivity when switching to a remote workforce.

Now, Fenway Health can keep providing service to patients, whether they’re calling in with questions or getting medical care. After seeing its success, Jon believes that more health center organizations will begin moving to telemedicine, thanks to how it enables patients to remotely connect with healthcare professionals and customer support.

And he’s absolutely certain that Fenway Health has made telemedicine and remote work much easier thanks to Dialpad.