How Austria's pharmacy salary fund cut call waits under 2 minutes with ROGER365.io

About Pharmazeutischer Gehaltsfonds

The Pharmaceutical Salary Fund for Austria, has served the country's pharmacists since 1908. Based in Vienna, it is a socio-economic institution for roughly 7,000 members and several thousand pensioners, and its work touches every pharmacy in Austria. Its remit is broad: salary and payroll processing, job placement, members' social security, services to pharmacies, and billing prescriptions to social insurers. Its motto, count on us, sums up the promise. Around 70 staff handle a steady stream of member enquiries, most of them by phone, so dependable and efficient telephone service is central to the organisation.

The Challenges

For an organisation whose members mostly pick up the phone, telephone service is the front door, and at the Pharmaceutical Salary Fund that door was crowded. Questions about salary payments, payroll, and prescription billing arrive every day and land in three queues, and the lines are especially busy at the end of each month. The fund already ran Microsoft Teams as its phone system, so it could handle the volume, but the standard setup had limits. Outdated routing sometimes sent callers to the wrong department, which stretched waiting and handling times beyond what the fund wanted for its members. Just as pressing, Teams on its own gave almost no reporting. Waiting time, call duration, abandonment rate, peak hours: the numbers the team needed to manage service were simply not there. Adding staff was not the answer the fund wanted. It set out to deliver better service with the same team, and to make its processes digital, automated, and measurable.

“We couldn't exploit our service potential with Teams alone. My team and I talk to our members every day, so we know where things are faltering and what good telephone service needs.” - Julia Berwein, Front Office Employee, Pharmaceutical Salary Fund for Austria

The Solution

The fund did not want to leave Microsoft Teams, it wanted to get more from it. So it looked for software that plugged into Teams and made call handling faster, more efficient, and friendlier for members, and found it in the ROGER365.io Contact Center. Pfalzcloud, a ROGER365.io partner, led the integration. It first took stock of the existing Teams settings, call volumes, IVR messages, and call flows, then built a proof of concept on a new service number, testing and refining it with every key stakeholder.

Today the fund runs the Contact Center inside Teams across its three queues. Front office staff see the caller's details, including the pharmacist's name, through a Power App that loads the member file, so service is personal from the first hello. The team configures call flows and announcements itself, and callers get an automatic callback option at busy times. Pfalzcloud reworked the routing so callers reach the right person. The platform is Microsoft certified and ISO 27001 certified, which matters for the sensitive member data the fund holds.

The Results

The results are concrete. Average waiting time now sits under two minutes, and call handling runs under three minutes, with post-processing time cut by 80%. Because Pfalzcloud reworked the routing, 90% of callers reach the right contact person, and abandoned calls have dropped below 3%, helped by an automatic callback offered when queues are busy. Members feel the difference: staff greet each caller by name, and the IVR can announce disruptions or status updates, so many callers get what they need without waiting for an agent. For the team, the biggest change is visibility. Waiting times, call duration, and peak hours are now measured, and the department presents its own service KPIs to management with confidence. The proof of concept was so solid that the fund chose to get started in live operation sooner than planned, seeing improvements within weeks. For a fund doing more with the same team, predictable pricing kept the business case simple, while Microsoft certification and ISO 27001 protect sensitive member data.

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“I was impressed that I can adapt call flows myself and configure announcements on an ad hoc basis. That lets us create a professional caller experience at all times.” - Julia Berwein, Front Office Employee, Pharmaceutical Salary Fund for Austria

Lessons Learned

The fund's own takeaway is about tempo. Once the proof of concept was running well, the team asked the obvious question, why wait, and moved to live operation earlier than planned. In hindsight they would trust a working setup sooner, rather than extend the testing phase. The other lesson is about people, not technology: acceptance came because management and the specialist department joined from the first planning session, not once the system was finished. Bringing the front office into the design meant the call flows matched how members actually behave.

The Future

The fund sees this as the first phase. Once it moves to its new ERP software, it plans to complete the Power App integration and connect the full member and customer database to the Contact Center, so agents open a caller's history the moment the phone rings. WhatsApp is on the list too, giving members another channel to reach the fund. Microsoft Teams stays the foundation, with Power Platform carrying the member data and room for AI features like transcription and summaries to lighten routine work as they mature.

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