Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust
The highly regarded healthcare trust uses RingCX to deliver an improved patient experience, create efficiencies and enable remote working.
30%
reduction in call-wait times during peak hours
6 weeks
from agreement to full RingCX implementation
2x
more visibility into call wait times using the RingCX analytics dashboard
Thanks to RingCX, we're able to deliver new services that benefit both our healthcare provider partners and the individuals under our care. Everyone is delighted with the results. We're saving our partners valuable time and resources while, more importantly, enhancing the overall experience for those we serve.
Gary Adams
Head of Digital Operations
Caring for hundreds of thousands of patients each year
Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust (HCT) is one of the region’s principal community-based healthcare providers for more than 1.2 million residents living in Hertfordshire, East Anglia, and nearby localities.
HCT’s range of services include in-home care (through its Hospital @ Home program), school nursing, treatments at the trust’s local clinics and community hospitals, nursing rehabilitation and palliative care. The organisation maintains a 93% patient-recommendation score.
INDUSTRY
Hospitals and healthcare
HQ
Welwyn Garden City, England
YEAR FOUNDED
2010
EMPLOYEES
3,000+
An emergency search for a new phone system
HCT’s Integrated Care Coordination team operated in a building owned by the local government authority. When the authority reclaimed the office space, HCT began a search for a new location to house its contact centre staff.
The local authority had also supplied the building’s telecommunications infrastructure–which the team couldn’t take with them, so a new phone system was also required.
“We had plans to move everybody into the new building in just six weeks,” says Gary Adams, HCT’s Head of Digital Operations. “Our staff coordinate important medical appointments for our patients every day, so we couldn’t afford delays in setting up a new contact centre.”
Although HCT’s legacy system performed sufficiently, Gary notes, it had several shortcomings. “The system did not have softphone capability, which meant we didn’t have flexibility in how and where our teams operated. Everyone needed handsets, HCT-issued mobiles, or both.”
Gary adds that the system's complexity and lack of self-service capabilities created far bigger operational challenges.
Even for minor changes, like adding a new user or changing an IVR’s instructions, we had to submit a request to the local authority and, if they approved it, wait for the provider to make the change. With RingCX, everything is so intuitive that even our non-IT administrators make these updates themselves in minutes.
Gary Adams
Head of Digital Operations
A recommendation that didn’t require a second opinion
Working with their trusted technology consultant, Future Voice and Data Limited, HCT selected RingCentral’s RingCX contact centre solution.
“Using RingCX’s softphone helped make our office transition easy,” he says. “Thanks to RingCentral’s user-friendly interface and the great training we received, we were able to empower our team to take calls at home from their laptops. By the time we were ready to move into the new building, they were all comfortable with the RingCX system.”
It took just six weeks to complete an issue-free implementation of RingCX for more than a 100 staff across various locations. I’ve had telephony deployments that involved half the staff–and 3x the timeframe to get it done–and we still had challenges. Here, we had none. It’s amazing.
Gary Adams
Head of Digital Operations
Business Support Manager Nigel Turner, who oversees HCT’s 120-person contact centre department, explains that even though they had only six weeks to fully implement RingCX, the deployment took place on time and without a single problem.
Gary credits both the RingCentral and Future Voice teams for such a smooth rollout. “Throughout the project, we kept in regular communication, and we all worked well together. It felt like a true partnership: HCT, RingCentral, and Future Voice all doing our parts to ensure a successful implementation.”
A healthy addition of contact centre capabilities
Nigel notes that the RingCX reporting, and analytics dashboard provide valuable new insights into the department’s overall efficiency. “The reports, which I had no problem setting up in RingCX, give me real-time access to the metrics that matter most to my teams. We have so much more useful data now that I’d say my managers and I have at least twice the visibility into everything that’s happening with our contact centre teams.”
One of the metrics Nigel can now track with more granularity than ever is average call wait time. Applying the insights from this data, he explains, has led to some of the biggest operational improvements he has seen.
RingCX’s reports give me valuable insights into our department’s key performance metrics. For example, I monitor our average call wait times, and that visibility helps me quickly divert resources when it’s clear we’re getting busy in a particular area. Having access to this data has helped us lower average wait times by 30% during peak times.
Gary Adams
Head of Digital Operations
Nigel adds that RingCX’s call recording – a feature his department didn’t have with the previous phone system–provides numerous operational benefits as well.
“Having access to recorded calls in RingCX gives us invaluable insights anytime we have an issue,” he says.
“Also, we’ve found these calls extremely useful for coaching staff and monitoring their performance. My favourite use, however, is using these calls to speed the onboarding of new staff. It’s so easy now to give a new starter real-world examples of standard calls, calls where a patient or provider is frustrated, and calls where one of our staff handles a difficult situation particularly well.”
Nigel also notes that RingCentral’s Workflow Studio makes it easy for even HCT’s non-technical managers to create and adjust their call routing rules.
The Workflow Studio puts our teams in charge of their own telephony experience. When they want to update where an IVR points or some other aspect of the caller’s journey, our managers can do it in RingCX’s intuitive environment without any help, and push it live straight away.
Nigel Turner
Business Support Manager
Customising workflows that can save lives
As Gary explains, the intuitive nature of RingCX’s administrative portal enabled HCT to build and deploy a new service for emergency medical calls.
“We combined a custom IVR with RingCX’s three-way calling capability to create a new feature for our ambulance service partners. When an ambulance is called to a patient’s home, the service calls our Integrated Care Coordination Hub through RingCX, gets connected with one of our staff, and together they determine which specialist to contact to help the patient. This helps the ambulance service bring patients to the right place more quickly–and in some cases, they determine the patient doesn’t need transportation to any hospital or facility.”
On the first day we rolled out our three-way-calling capability for ambulance callouts, our teams were able to provide in-home care for 15 patients who otherwise would’ve been transported to hospitals because the emergency team didn’t know beforehand what care they needed. This saves our ambulance partners resources, helps them turn their vehicles around more quickly so they can care for more people, and improves the experience for our patients.
Gary Adams
Head of Digital Operations
Eyeing RingCX’s AI capabilities to add even more efficiencies
Looking to the future, Gary explains, HCT is now researching the capabilities of AI Quality Management for RingCX, the platform’s built-in AI solution. Having seen AI Quality Management’s ability to analyse and report caller sentiments, deliver call scores, and auto-generate full transcripts, Gary is interested in the solution’s potential to continually improve the contact centre operations.
I’m confident that supplementing our RingCX platform with new AI capabilities will help us enhance both our efficiency and the caller experience for our providers and patients.
Gary Adams
Head of Digital Operations