Cyara Pulse Keeps New Zealand's Ministry Of Social Development Online To Serve Customers

Online, November 16, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Cyara Solutions today announced that the New Zealand's Ministry of Social Development (MSD) has adopted its Pulse product to automatically test the operations of its call centers, removing the need for daily manual testing.

The Ministry delivers a wide range of income support and social services to more than one million citizens and operates 20 call centers as its first point of contact for inquires.

The call centers are therefore mission-critical and Brent Ludlam, the Ministry's Voice manager, says he used to conduct daily tests of all queues to make sure the call centers were ready for business.

"At 6:00AM every day, an hour before the contact centers go live, I tested all my big queues," he says. "That way I could say, hand on heart, that I knew the state they were in at the start of a business day."

But Ludlam recognised that this practice was overly-time consuming, and meant the Ministry relied on his personal diligence. He was also less-than-thrilled by the endless early starts!
Enter Cyara Pulse, which now conducts automated tests of the Ministry's call centers to make sure they are ready for business each day, relieving Ludlam of the need for manual tests at dawn.

"I still do run my own tests - I think I am a bit of a control freak - but I only test 10 instead of 50. I trust the tool to do some of the testing for me," he says. "I only test the critical ones now. Cyara has done the rest and tells me when they are okay."

Cyara Pulse also monitors the contact centers around the clock, and if performance ever falls below desired thresholds, Ludlam receives a SMS notification and can initiate action to restore service and ensure customers get the experience they deserve.

Overall, Ludlam says introducing Cyara to the Ministry's call centers has made their operations more robust.

"Our testing was completely manual and inefficient," Ludlam says. "The quality of people determined quality of testing, or we would conduct simple tests to make sure network components would fail over in high availability and disaster recovery scenarios."

Now, he says, the Ministry understands its operations inside out and can more easily plan for future innovation. Ministry-wide voicemail upgrade has already been planned, with Cyara central to Ludlam's upgrade plans.

"I won't be testing that manually - it's another job for Cyara," he says. "It brings project costs and timeframes down."

About the Ministry of Social Development

MSD is all about helping to build successful individuals, and in turn building strong, healthy families and communities. It's a big job - we're tackling some of the big issues in society, like family violence and youth offending.

We're working towards this through providing:
- care and protection of vulnerable children and young people
- employment, income support and superannuation services
- funding to community service providers
- social policy and advice to government
- student allowances and loans.

Our work touches the lives of more than one million New Zealanders. In 2007 we provided:
- retirement income support to over 500,000 older people
- financial support to about 261,000 working age people unable to work through health family or employment circumstances
- help with living expenses for the 1.1 million people receiving a Community Services Card
- Student Loans to some 134,000 people to help with their full time study costs
- Student allowances to around 52,000 students to help with their living costs.

This is not work we do alone. We work closely with other government agencies, non-government organisations, advisory and industry groups, and communities and iwi. Together we aim to make a positive and lasting difference in the lives of New Zealanders.

www.msd.govt.nz