Reliable call routing during crisis

Liberty Converse deployed to take the strain in the face of the Covid pandemic

The challenge

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.

Liberty Converse takes the strain

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

The solution

“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 result

  • The Converse installation was brought forward, going live within a week
  • A front-end greeting was applied immediately, advising callers about making contact
  • Reactions needed to be faster than normal due to Covid, so Converse was deployed to handle external calls as well as internal, to reduce call waiting times and switchboard pressure. Converse handled 53% of external calls in that initial month
  • Converse is so sophisticated, reliable and easy to use it immediately began handling a huge proportion of internal and external calls successfully – despite the Trust not having time to update all contact information fully or to educate staff (due to the rapid deployment)
  • In May 2020, the first month with Converse, Switchboard staff dealt with 4,000 internal calls and 34,000 external calls, compared to 27,000 internal calls and 64,000 external calls the previous May
Lancashire Teaching Hospitals
Spending more time on what counts

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.

Impact

1 Week

implementation

85%

fewer internal calls to switchboard

53%

external calls directed by speechbot in first month

Delight your patients

Here’s how you can handle internal and external calls and relieve pressure on the switchboard

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