The Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust | Outpatients transformation
RCHT embarked on an outpatient transformation programme to optimise their referrals and give patients greater control and convenience with their appointments
Liberty Converse deployed to take the strain in the face of the Covid pandemic
Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust operates across three busy hospital sites in North West England. It was upgrading an earlier Netcall contact centre to Liberty Converse when the pandemic hit.
Under pressure to deal with increased call volumes and prioritise urgent calls, they needed to immediately advise callers of how, when and where they could make contact with their sites.
The Trust invested in the Liberty Converse speech bot to handle the internal calls and relieve pressure on the switchboard.
“Liberty Converse became as successful, if not more so, in answering and directing more calls from members of the public for the first time than we could have imagined. It was a very swift implementation, and now we are working to maximise the system and ensure that staff make full use of it on every internal call.”
Louise Simpson
Head of Telecommunications, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals
Concerned that their patients and external callers weren’t ready to interact with a speech bot, the Trust intended to use Liberty Converse only as an internal operator to relieve the switchboard. Covid put the Trust under pressure – reactions needed to be faster than usual. So, they deployed Converse to handle external calls as well, to reduce call waiting times and switchboard pressure.
Despite not having fully updated all their contact and bleep information, or educated hospital staff on using Converse, it immediately began successfully handling a large proportion of internal and external calls.
The Switchboard Team operated around-the-clock shifts, a busy team of 20 staff who handled a considerable volume of calls, including many internal calls between staff members.
Now, the team is upskilled and trained on other tasks, such as working within the IT helpdesk. Each site still has a night operator, but Converse reliably routes calls, so call volumes to the switchboard have significantly reduced. The operators now update on-call rotas and deal with database tasks between much less frequent switchboard calls.
Patients have adopted a bot as a ‘virtual operator’ very well. The Telecoms Team has worked to reduce granular details and pronunciation issues on the live system. Patient feedback and first-time resolution rates continue to improve.
Staff also utilise the system, seeing how reliable it is at routing calls, as they know it means less time on hold to the switchboard.
“I was unsure at first, but now I feel it has really helped. We now have only two members of staff required on shift but it’s less stressful.”
Switchboard operator
The Trust aims to continue to populate the administration system with more information, contact details and bleep details, which will further improve the call handling and first time resolution that the bots can provide. Plus, the Trust is investigating adding an additional two bots to ensure they don’t hit thresholds in busy periods. Ensuring that staff can make full use of Converse means that the Switchboard Team can help callers with complex enquiries and to work on other administration tasks.
1 Week
implementation
85%
fewer internal calls to switchboard
53%
external calls directed by speechbot in first month
Here’s how you can handle internal and external calls and relieve pressure on the switchboard
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