Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust optimises inbound and emergency call handling rates
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is one of the UK’s largest trusts. They provide acute and specialist healthcare in north-west London – across five busy sites – to around 1.5 million people annually.
Fielding over 11,500 inbound calls daily, 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 relieving strain on operators – helping reduce caller frustration, ward disruptions and rising call volumes.
In the case of emergency calls – where the time to answer is under 10 seconds – Imperial needed to rapidly identify these priority calls amid high call volumes to trigger emergency protocols. They already used Liberty Converse, our omnichannel contact centre solution, and they decided to deploy Converse’s speech recognition Interactive Voice Response (IVR) module to help with these challenges.
“Our whole premise now is to offer a better service, where calls that go to an Operator get the time they need to fully explain their request. And because calls are correctly routed at the start, ward time isn’t being wasted and calls don’t circle back to switchboard — which was frustrating for patients.”
John Wintour-Pittom
Head of Operations for Trust Telecom, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
80%
calls handled via automation
90%
calls answered in 30s
0
calls unanswered
“Speech recognition has allowed our operators to deliver a more quality focused service. Without it, there would be a lot of internal and external dissatisfaction. Patients and colleagues wouldn’t get the service they deserve.”
John Wintour-Pittom
Head of Operations for Trust Telecom, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
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