National Health Service

The National Health Service (NHS) provides a comprehensive range of health services, the vast majority of which are free for people legally resident in the UK. The Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust is one of the largest general hospital foundation trusts in the country. They provide acute medical and surgical services along with specialist services such as oncology, dialysis and eye surgery to a wider population across Berkshire and its borders.

The Challenge

The Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust initially required an 03 Number for one of their departments. After the successful implementation of the number, their requirements quickly expanded to needing additional 0300 Numbers (exclusive to charities and not-for-profit organisations) for a selection of their key divisions.

The Trust originally worked with traditional PBX plug-in phones that just about managed transferring a call to a colleague. With various sites requiring the ability to route calls between themselves, as well as divisions and teams that re-locate regularly, it became very difficult for the Trust to manage their telecommunications. They also wanted to keep their numbers and work remotely as if they had stayed in the same location, so they needed a serious update to their existing Phone System.

As the Trust continues to embrace a more modern way of working, they have ongoing requirements for more functionality and maintiaining professional consistency across departments and locations. They also need any new products to be scalable and allow for additional users to be added immediately.

Customer Requirements

• Hosted Contact Centre Solution
• Selection of 0300 Numbers
• Call Queuing
• Professionally recorded IVR
• Ease of transferring calls
• Wallboard Call Analytics

Telecoms World Solution

Telecoms World work extremely closely with the NHS Berkshire Trust to actively meet all requirements and suggest new products or changes in current procedures to enhance their Phone System. Providing Call Queuing with the Cloud Hosted Contact Centre Solution has drastically improved caller experience and has reduced call abandonment, whilst Smart Call Routing and the mid-call transfer service frees up lines internally and offers ease of transferring calls between departments. Voicemail-to-email allows all calls to be captured and any voicemail messages are sent to a dedicated email address in MP4 format.

A key requirement for the Phone System was being able to schedule any call diverts in advance. So if a team or department are on a training day, for example, then calls to a particular number can be scheduled to divert to an alternative department. A Hosted Contact Centre service has also proved invaluable as office staff, home and remote workers have full access to the Phone System as if they were all in the same office  and can work efficiently wherever they are. The Phone System recognises how many users are logged in, so if anyone is on the phone, calls are diverted to available staff members. All calls are answered with an advanced IVR (interactive voice response) system with greetings and messages voiced by a professional recording artist for consistency across all numbers.

All products and services are hosted in the cloud with easy online access. Different levels of access for managers and staff give autonomy in their daily roles to log in to the Phone System from the office or remotely and work in harmony from any location.

Solution Components

• Call Statistics
• 0300 and selection of Virtual Numbers
• Mid-call transfer
• Hosted Phone System
• Online portal and remote access
• Voicemail to email

Results

'We have worked with Telecoms World on several projects, each of these have improved how our departments manage calls. It is great to know we have a knowledgable and supportive communications provider and look forward to take further advantage of their hosted telephony services.'
‍Khuram Afzal IT Project Manager - NHS Foundation Trust