Sword Ciboodle and Marie Curie Cancer Care Successfully Redefine "Healthcare Customer Service"

GLASGOW, Scotland, September 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

End of life nursing care provider Short-Listed for European Call Center & Customer Service Awards as it Completes its Second Year of Leveraging Sword Ciboodle's Customer Engagement Platform

Sword Ciboodle, a global provider of customer engagement solutions, announced today that Marie Curie Cancer Care (MCCC) - one of the UK's largest providers of end of life nursing services - has achieved tremendous, life-impacting results from its Patient Connect system by leveraging Sword Ciboodle's Customer Engagement platform. MCCC is responsible for the coordination of roughly 2,700 nurses who provide more than 1.5 million hours of end-of-life care to over 27,000 patients in their own homes across the country. A two year partnership with Sword Ciboodle has resulted in significant success milestones within the first 10 months of system implementation. These include a 75 percent reduction in the time taken to create a referral and assign a nurse from an average of 25 minutes to about six. Additionally, MCCC reported a dramatic reduction in training time for new coordinators in the referral center from five weeks to four days.

MCCC originally chose Sword Ciboodle's technology to help it achieve a growth goal of doubling its level of patient care within three years without having to increase headcount and expenditure. MCCC managed to make tremendous strides since November 2010, particularly in its delivery of care. Each referral request is matched to nursing staff based on a number of criteria including distance to patient, skill level and availability. Volumes of these activities average 5500 inbound calls and in excess of 2800 patient visits per week. Sword Ciboodle helped MCCC increase the speed of response to patient, nurse and coordinator requests, which in turn has had an invaluable impact on the end-of-life specialty care MCCC provides, having improved customer service levels by 20% and increased patient visits by a third.

"The founders of MCCC pioneered hospice and home based nursing care in the UK way back in 1948," said Susan Munroe, Director of Nursing and Patient Services for Marie Curie Cancer Care. "Sword Ciboodle has helped to take that vision to a whole new level, providing our staff, nurses and patients with a level of customer care efficiency that truly impacts lives. Within the UK, research shows 65% of people would choose to die at home. Whilst we now care for 50% of all cancer patients that die at home we are constantly striving to increase that number across all end of life patients and these system led efficiencies are a significant enabler towards achieving this strategic objective."

"It is not every day that a customer engagement technology company gets to step back and say its product is truly touching lives in a profound way," said Paul White, Worldwide CMO of Sword Ciboodle. "Yet here we are, and we could not be prouder. MCCC has grown on many levels in leaps and bounds, and we are looking forward to continually supporting MCCC as it reaches even greater heights in nurse-patient support."

Marie Curie's Patient Connect system has been shortlisted for the 'Best Use of Technology Award' at this year's European Call Center & Customer Service Awards.  Watch our MCCC video to learn even more about this landmark program http://bit.ly/MCCCvid. Visit Sword Ciboodle at the upcoming Call Centre & Customer Management Expo 2011, taking place on October 11 - 12, 2011 at the National Hall Olympia, London, at stand D18. Meet members of Marie Curie Cancer Care's team at the event to hear how they are enriching patient support with Sword Ciboodle.

To read Sword Ciboodle Reviews from Gartner, Forrester and others, please visit:

http://www.swordciboodle.com/en-us/insights/analysts/featured/

To learn more about Sword Ciboodle's award winning, modular, multi-channel Customer Engagement Platform, please visit: http://www.sword-ciboodle.com/en-us/products/ciboodle-family/

ABOUT SWORD CIBOODLE 

Sword Ciboodle delivers award-winning, modular CRM software to contact centers worldwide, enabling advanced customer engagement across multiple social channels. The Sword Ciboodle platform is essentially categorized into three tiers of service that empower your valued customers to: "be served, be solo, and be social."  Through these tiers, the company's family of products accelerates your ability to deliver consistent customer service, leading to exceptional end-user experiences that reduce overall operational costs and achieve higher revenue.

Sword Ciboodle and its contact center software are consistently recognized by industry analysts as one of the world's leading customer-centric solutions; featured by the prestigious Gartner Magic Quadrant, CRM Customer Service Contact Centers, for five consecutive years. With staff located across 5 continents, Sword Ciboodle clients include Sears, Sony, Admiral, JP Morgan Chase, Standard Bank and Eskom.

For more information, please visit http://www.sword-ciboodle.com, join the CRM discussion on our "Under the C" blog at http://www.sword-ciboodle.com/blog/, and follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/sword_ciboodle.

Contact: Anne Coyle, +1-857-222-6363, anne@jaxsongroup.com