Patient-first service

Imperial College drives efficient omnichannel digital service and
an improved patient experience.

The challenge

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.

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.

Meeting daily demand

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.

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“Having Liberty platform allows us to be a fully digitised 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.”

John Wintour-Pittom

Head of Operations for Trust Telecom, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust

The solution

Liberty Converse for a patient-first 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
  • Supervisor availability for immediate authorisation/advice
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“On a typical day, by lunchtime, our Outpatients Team answers 575 calls and only had 10 abandoned calls. We are immensely proud of the consistent 95% average call waiting time and the low abandonment rate. Their performance is amazing because we have the tech to monitor and adjust at all times and the agents are free to get on with helping patients.”

John Wintour-Pittom

Head of Operations for Trust Telecom, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust

The result

  • 95% average call waiting time within 1 minute
  • Call abandon rate under 5%
  • Team freed up to do other patient admin
  • Less unanswered calls
  • Improved patient experience

Impact

95%

calls answered within 1 minute

<5%

call abandon rate

time for other admin tasks

Improve patient experience

Manage volumes effectively while delivering a digital service to delight patients.

More case studies

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust | Efficient call handling

Fielding over 11,500 inbound calls a day, agents had little time to determine call purpose before routing calls. With a target KPI of answering 70% of all calls within 30 seconds, they needed a solution for optimising inbound and emergency calls by tackling incorrect transfers and relieve strain on operators.