Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation trust | Reliable call routing during crisis
Rotherham was one of the first NHS Trust to see the potential of AI in a contact centre environment
Moving forward was a migration to the latest version of Liberty Converse, hosted in the cloud
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.
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 Trust polled the opinion of UHB staff who use the different call centre services and they gave a clear endorsement for the Liberty Converse solution. Staff said it was easier to use, more intuitive and had essential functionality as standard (provided by third party applications in the Cisco environment which was in use at the other site).
A review of the functionality and associated costs for each of the call centre services further supported the case for Converse.
A transformation project was presented to UHB’s executives as a ‘spend to save initiative’ which forecast a significant reduction in annual spend on switchboard and contact centre services. It was based on using existing infrastructure where possible.
Two separate networks were combined as part of the project.
“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 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.
United
complex environment joined together
Remote Working
from home or other hospital sites
Future-proof
robust and cost-effective
Transform your contact centre at speed – Liberty Converse technology allows for rapid integration with crucial third-party systems – reducing time, cost and complexity
Rotherham was one of the first NHS Trust to see the potential of AI in a contact centre environment
The Patient Administration System was being updated to give more flexibility to meet patient and staff needs, but the Trust wanted to enable more ways for patients to engage digitally with clinical services – and their contact centre solution was reaching capacity.
‘Did Not Attend’ (DNA) rates are a problem for many hospitals and NHS Trusts. The Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust DNA rate was 7.6% for new patients and 8.9% for follow-ups.