Trust shifts to the cloud

Moving forward was a migration to the latest version of Liberty Converse, hosted in the cloud

The challenge

University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) is one of the largest and busiest teaching hospital Trusts in England, treating more than 2.2 million people every year. UHB joined with Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust in 2018. They now had multiple legacy IT and telephony systems that were heavy on resource support and with high annual costs, and most were held on-premise.

Transforming with a single platform

UHB has two separate call centre services. The Trust’s transformation goals include consolidating the switchboards into a single entity and rationalising the call centres with the use of a single platform. With more sites available, there was a need for staff to work from any of the six sites – so being able to work from anywhere became more important than ever. UHB decided the solution to take forward was a migration to the latest version of Liberty Converse, our omnichannel contact centre solution, hosted in the cloud and with switchboard services built into Netcall’s cloud environment.

“Netcall understood the complexity of our very large combined organisation and supported us to transition from a legacy contact centre system to a modern, robust, cost-effective cloud service, available from anywhere, which is fit for the future.”

IT Services, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust

The solution

“It has been a pleasure to work closely with the Netcall commercial and operational teams to make our transition to cloud services aspiration a reality much sooner than we had anticipated.

IT Services, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust

The result

  • Reduced existing internal infrastructure, maintenance and resource costs
  • Introduced operational efficiencies that will benefit all users of the service, including patients and their relatives
  • Gained infrastructure economies of scale by consolidating the switchboards
  • Saved equipment and maintenance costs
  • Using automated speech recognition to front all calls releases the switchboard team from more than 50% of routine requests, so they can concentrate on the calls with more complex requirements
  • Callers to UHB’s hospitals benefit from faster response times
  • Switchboard operators have more time to manage other mission-critical tasks, such as managing emergency calls and clinical on-call rotas
  • Enabled Consultants to move between Trust sites as Converse’s IVR module is able to ‘find’ them by ringing their allocated numbers in turn, which means that everyone is contactable wherever they are
Consolidate and simplify

The project resolved overlapping IP addressing and routing issues. It also fixed overlapping internal telephone extension numbering which had to be managed as switchboards were consolidated.

It allowed technologies used to provide call centres, call recording, call logging and wallboards to be consolidated and simplified.

Impact

United

complex environment joined together

Remote Working

from home or other hospital sites

Future-proof

robust and cost-effective

Simpler transformation with ready-to-go integration

Transform your contact centre at speed – Liberty Converse technology allows for rapid integration with crucial third-party systems – reducing time, cost and complexity

More case studies

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust | Patient-first service

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is one of the UK’s largest trusts. 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.

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.