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Ambulance Radio Programme (ARP)

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Establishing a world-class digital foundation for emergency services across the UK

About the ARP

The Ambulance Radio Programme (ARP) delivers mission-critical communication and mobilisation technologies to ensure effective communication between Ambulance Service Trusts, the NHS, and other emergency responders across the UK. 

The Challenge

The successful delivery of emergency services depends on critical platforms being always on and always available, ensuring citizens in the most remote areas can always make contact and receive aid as quickly as possible. With even the smallest periods of downtime potentially costing lives, ARP demands the highest standards of performance and resilience from its underlying connectivity, with rigorous SLAs in place to ensure these targets are met.

In order to further optimise the availability of emergency services across the UK, there are currently two major programmes being implemented by ARP across the UK. The Control Room Solution (CRS), which is utilised by ambulance services across England and Scotland, ensuring critical communications between the emergency control room dispatchers and operational crews are completely seamless. The Mobile Data & Vehicle Solution (MDVS) will replace legacy communications equipment for the English and Welsh Ambulance Service Trusts.

Both programmes required a secure, resilient, and highly available IT infrastructure as the underlying foundation, for which ARP selected the Exponential-e Group - encompassing Exponential-e, Vysiion, and Xpertex - as their trusted technology partner. 

The programme has lots of moving parts, and a lot of key users and stakeholders - all with unique needs and ways of working. ARP needed a team, processes, and technologies which could be used to create a common service, capable of integrating with each Ambulance Trust and user organisation.

Mathew Baker, IT Service Manager, ARP

The Solution 

The Exponential-e Group has worked closely with ARP for a number of years, beginning with the CNAM project, which Vysiion successfully executed before its acquisition by the Group. Here, multiple critical platforms that were previously managed on a regional basis, with discrete infrastructure and applications run independently by each Trust across England and Wales, were fully centralised in ARP's data centres, including both CRS and MDVS. A whole new network was utilised as the foundation, connecting the centralised ARP control room applications to each regional Trust's control rooms. This highly resilient network infrastructure was designed to maintain the highest levels of uptime and availability across all regions, optimising the delivery of critical services.

ARP would later build on these early successes, engaging the wider Exponential-e Group as its requirements evolved. Exponential-e later delivered a fully centralised, UK-based service desk, available 24 / 7, and continues to work with ARP's own teams to identify new opportunities for service improvements and process optimisation.

Over the course of several years, the partnership between ARP and the Exponential-e Group has continued to evolve and is now in a strong position to take on further challenges. A particular focus is the digitisation of processes and onboarding of multiple new solutions to further optimise the availability and delivery of emergency services nationwide.

Solution benefits

  • Full centralisation of multiple critical platforms, powered by a highly resilient, highly available private network, supporting consistent performance and availability of critical services across all regions.
  • A 24 / 7, UK-based service desk for all IT-related questions, concerns, and incident management.
  • A partnership built on trust, consultation, and service quality, driving ongoing improvements.
  • Hands-on engagement and integration with other suppliers.


It's time for the public sector to have its own digital-revolution

The public sector's digital journey is accelerating at an unprecedented rate, with leading-edge technology transforming the way critical services are delivered across the country. This exclusive report from Exponential-e explores the challenges and opportunities involved, and explains how public sector organisations can be part of this digital revolution.
Click to read It’s time for the public sector to have its own digital revolution
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ARP Mobile Data & Vehicle Solution mission-critical communication digital transformation for ambulance services
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Exponential-e & BDO

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Working together to establish a new standard of excellence for IT service desk operations

About BDO

BDO UK provides tax, audit and assurance, advisory, and business outsourcing services to companies across the public and private sectors, with more than 9,500 employees operating out of 18 office locations across the UK.
The Challenge

In order to better support its analysts across the country, the decision was made to execute a full-scale digital transformation of the entire Virtual Contact Centre and Teams Dialling system, building on the existing investment in Microsoft Teams to establish a centralised platform through which end users could make contact via a range of channels, including voice, email, and chatbot. This would ultimately support the phasing out of legacy telephony in favour of more scalable, flexible omnichannel solutions, while providing team leaders with real-time visibility of the entire service desk operation. The quality of BDO's IT service desk improved as an outcome acknowledged by the Service Desk Institute, who awarded it a four-star rating in 2024.

Critical priorities for the project were simplifying the management of Microsoft Teams licences, which needed to be purchased on an individual basis with the incumbent solution, and streamlining and optimising the user journey wherever possible, taking full advantage of the latest innovations in AI-powered automation and analytics.

A rigorous tender process was conducted, with a key priority being the ability to design and deliver a solution within four months, avoiding any operational disruption. At the end of this process, Exponential-e were selected as the sole technology partner for the project, building on an already strong partnership with BDO, and began working closely with their contact centre and back-office teams to determine the ideal specifications for the new platform.

Based on this findings of this assessment process, Exponential-e's Teams Calling as-a-Service platform, integrated with the industry-leading Five9 Intelligent CX suite and the ServiceNow® ITSM solution, was identified as the perfect fit for BDO's requirements, providing users with the Teams functionality they had come to depend on, while also opening the door to a wide range of potential enhancements. 

The Solution

The tools Exponential-e have provided have contributed towards the digital transformation journey BDO have been on. Our mutual passion for the user experience has helped us reshape our whole approach to the service desk, and we're very much looking forward to building on these successes in the years ahead.

Lee Trimmer, Head of Service Delivery, BDO

The first phase of the deployment involved managing a seamless transition for all analysts and end users by replicating their existing Teams functionality in the new platform, allowing them to start making use of it straight away. This meant the migration process was completely invisible to the 6,000 employees already using Teams.

With this foundation in place, BDO began working with their dedicated account team to identify potential opportunities for automation, the first of which involved the onboarding process for new joiners, who would automatically receive an email with the details of the Teams dial pad, with no manual intervention required. At the same time, should an end user leave the company, their account would automatically be closed and their number made available again. This pay-as-you-go model immediately resulted in tangible cost savings by ensuring BDO would only ever pay for the licences in active use.

Building on this, the Five9 platform was heavily customised to suit BDO's specific goals for its overall user journey. Key to this was the integration of the platform's chatbot with BDO's own Azure LLM and ServiceNow®, allowing it full access to an evolving knowledge library. This bespoke chatbot (dubbed ELSA!) is now able to automatically direct users to the article most likely to lead to a successful resolution. If it is unable to do so, they are automatically put through to the appropriate analyst.

ELSA's intuitive, conversational interface and broad range of insights meant the initial uptake was high, averaging more than 200 interactions per month, of which around 50% are resolved with no need for human intervention. The chatbot's capabilities have since been extended to run automated routine fixes with BDO's primary audit tool, saving service desk analysts time and offering the users faster resolutions.

As a result of these improvements, BDO have significantly reduced their service desk's dependence on traditional telephony and email, with most end users now preferring the inherent flexibility and ease of the new chat and self-service options, allowing analysts to more efficiently manage their cases.

With the implementation of Five9's workforce engagement tool, BDO are looking to automate further quality control checks to focus directly on problem areas rather than relying on dip sampling calls. Through the application of intelligent analytics, this identifies which interactions team leaders should listen to in order to support their analysts, identify gaps in the user experience, and act on new opportunities for improvement as they emerge. When combined with the technical data collected by ServiceNow®, this will provide BDO with a holistic, real-time view of its entire service desk operation.

The transformation of BDO's service desk was later recognised at the Service Desk Institute's 2025 awards ceremony, where it was named as 'Service Desk of the Year – Large Team'. It is also now eligible to be certified as a five-star service desk, of which there are only four in the world at the time of writing.

BDO have long led the charge for service desk excellence, and the success of this project is testament to that. When people and technology come together in this way, a seamless, interconnected user experience becomes possible across every channel, which I fully expect to become the new standard for service desk operations.

Gareth Hayes, Head of UC & CX Solutions, Exponential-e

Solution Benefits

  • A seamless migration process from disparate legacy technologies, with no disruption to day-to-day operations

  • Intelligent automation of routine processes enhances analysts' efficiency and performance, freeing them to focus on the most complex cases

  • 50% of all interactions resolved without any need for human intervention, thanks to a bespoke chatbot and evolving knowledge base 

  • Automated onboarding and offboarding of employees and sustainable cost savings through pay-as-you-go pricing
Tags:
Contact centre automation ai service desk Finance
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