Feros Care: Transformation is the new BAU

Feros Care believes ongoing transformation work and adaptation should be considered standard practice in business operations as the organisation prepares for future changes.

Jaime Johnston-Smith, general manager for contact centres at Feros Care told a Genesys Xperience Sydney audience the aged care and disability support organisation first implemented Genesys healthcare software back in 2016.

Johnston-Smith liked the “walk, run and fly” mentality of businesses taking a structured and phased approach to growth.

“We’re still walking. We want to move to the ‘run’ and we want to fly because there are reforms in our sector and we need to be ready for those and we are classing as being ’match fit’.

“We need to be very efficient at what we do and at the lowest cost possible because we rely on government funding for a lot of our programs.”

Johnston-Smith added she was “excited to think that by the time we get to transformation, there'll be a lot more agile actions we can put in place to get immediate outcomes to show the benefit of the future.”

“But the other learning that I have, I went into the ELT [executive leadership team] and said this is not what I would call a project where it has a start and an end date.

“What I've been learning at conferences is transformation is the new BAU [business as usual] and as a result of that you need to, where you're saving maybe FTE, you need to repurpose those into roles, curators of knowledge, people that understand what this is going to enable us to do for the future.

Johnston-Smith explained that without this in place, “you're going to come back to the table to ask for more money and more resources.”

Part of Johnston-Smith’s learnings have involved understanding that “if we're going to fly let's pull off those fundamentals in place at the beginning.”

Johnston-Smith added the healthcare organisation’s story “has been a journey of learning.”

“We’re on a really good path at the moment for transformation and we've had an endorsement with our ELT and soon-to-be the board to transform this tool into so much more than what it was intended for in the beginning, which is sort of like a contact centre telephony platform.”

“Just to give you a little bit of scope, our contact centre does all of our intake of our community care clients.

"We do our rostering of all of our community workforce, our clinicians, allied health care team and we also do all of our client experience,” Johnston-Smith said.  

She added that within the ecosystem of its contact centre, “it's just not one dimensional.”