Case Study: Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust Reduces Call Wait Times With Netcall

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is one of the UK’s largest trusts. They provide acute and specialist healthcare in north-west London – across five busy sites – to circa 1.5 million people every year.

Challenges

With their Central Booking Outpatients, Admissions and Switchboard teams in one building, Imperial needed a contact centre solution that would effectively allow them to manage their patient contacts – delivering an omnichannel digital service.

Switchboard alone, for example, used to handle an average of 11,500 interactions a day. Call fluctuations and siloed departments made it difficult to meet daily demand – leaving upwards of 800 calls unanswered at times.

These missed calls presented a lost opportunity to free up availability of limited clinical resources and a significant amount of failure demand. The new solution would have to accept more calls, without extra headcount, and drive efficient digital patient interactions.

Solution

Along with key KPIs (associated with response times), supervisors listen to call recordings, maintaining quality standards and developing agent skills through training.

Liberty Converse, Netcall’s omnichannel contact centre solution, drives continuous improvement, empowering agents to ‘own’ and enhance performance.

Patient Service Centre Supervisors manage large teams of 20–50 agents and monitor call queues, with instant visibility across the whole team (on-site or remote). Every agent uses an activity code, so they can make changes/pull in more agents with the right skills.

For outpatients, when queues reach a certain level, callers are offered a callback. This helps alleviate pressure on agents and offers proactive patient contact. As a fully digitized service, agents can work from anywhere, providing a quality-focused service.

By implementing Liberty Converse, Imperial can handle multiple skill and queue types. Agents use a single dashboard to view number of answered calls, number of call redirects, number of calls abandoned and % abandon rate, current average wait time, current longest wait, calls waiting and supervisor availability for immediate authorization/advice.

The Result

This resulted in 95% of calls answered within one minute, with call abandon rate below 5%. The team is freed up to handle other patient admin tasks, resulting in fewer unanswered calls and improved patient experience.

John Wintour-Pittom, Head of Operations for Trust Telecom, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, said, “Having Liberty platform allows us to be a fully digitized service. Our agents can successfully work from anywhere – including answering emergency calls from home.

The only barrier we actually faced was upgrading hard-copy documents – once we created these digitally, everything worked seamlessly.”

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Netcall – View the Original Article

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Author: Netcall
Reviewed by: Rachael Trickey