Tell us a little about you and your work at Cancer Council?

I am the Contact Centre Innovation Lead and Quitline Manager. I have worked at the Cancer Council Victoria (CCV) for 9 years in the prevention and support of people diagnosed with Cancer. Cancer Council Victoria is working on a number of digital projects to increase engagement with its support lines and gather richer data to drive decisions.

There’s a lot of digital transformation happening across the country and so many organisations are doing their part to innovate. What types of digital strategies are you driving at the moment?

Quitting smoking isn’t an easy task, the Cancer Council of Victoria is implementing new, innovative technologies to help people butt their cigarette out once and for all. We are currently working on a new Omni-channel and CRM solution as well as AI to provide after hours support for people who are wanting support in quitting smoking. It's predominantly a research-based support for smokers who are wanting support with quitting with the counselling service that we provide. But VicHealth being one of our major funders for Quit itself, wanted to see if there was any sort of digital innovations that we could somehow use or adopt within the service itself,”

Can you tell to us a little more about how you’re implementing digital at Cancer Council? How are you doing and what does your roll out strategy look like?

There is a lot of work being carried out across multiple divisions. There is a designated Project Management Office comprising of Project Managers and Business Analysts. Each of the projects has bee broken down into different phases and stages comprising of workshops that map current and future states and working towards more streamlined processes with a key goal of a one way same way approach. Quitline partnered with AI-based software Curious Thing, to help create a survey that created more open-ended answers.

One of the key measures we're focused on was looking at the completion rates, how many people could complete a survey. We're in a predicament where if we call someone and they say they're not smoking, that's fine. But if we don't get a hold of them, the assumption is, from a valuation perspective that they've potentially gone back to smoking or still smoking, it's challenging.

For us, completions rates are important in understanding whether the technology is worth the investment and having two projects both URL and SMS running parallel to see which provides the best response rates. A concern was that the calls would be considered spam, so we set up the actual process flow to alleviate that as much as possible. It starts off with an SMS explaining that they're going to receive a call from a digital health. The idea is that the SMS sort of preamps that this is what's going to take place.

If they've got any concerns, they can call us on our standard number. If a caller is concerned about there being spam the AI will pick up on that and say this is from the Quitline number. There are greater possibilities now understanding that the technology and how it can work and how intuitive it actually is. We'll be doing a lot more thinking around other ways that we can incorporate it not just using it for reengagement, but also other aspects of the business as well.

What do you want Australia's Healthcare Community to know about your work and why is it important? 

It's so important for us to share the work that we are doing in partnership with VicHealth and Curious Things in relation to using Conversations AI to engage with clients. Seeing significant improvements in our response rates through the use of technology, it's great for people to hear about the steps involved in using technology to support the contact centre and how to ensure that the AI is able to handle complex and sensitive topics of discussion. We are most proud of our use of AI and ML to improve personalisation strategy; ensuring accurate and clean data to map the processes in achieving a project like this; and mapping out our digital matrix to ensure the technology we've invested in is operating efficiently.