Helping the NHS pay its bills can be a rewarding experience, as a recent report proves. A benchmarking report by the Contact Centre Management Association has found that the customer support centre at NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) – which provides corporate services to NHS organisations – answers calls in just 80 seconds, compared with 139 seconds in other organisations, and 95% of issues are resolved after just one enquiry, compared with 76% in others.
The report also found that NHS SBS’s agents receive almost double the average amount of training and the centre has one of the country’s lowest attrition rates, at just 7%, compared with an average of 28%.
NHS SBS provides corporate services like finance and accounting to NHS organisations. Its 67-strong customer support centre deals with enquiries from these NHS organisations and their suppliers.
John Murphy, head of customer excellence at NHS SBS explained:
“The finance and accounting service here at NHS SBS is at the heart of the NHS. When you visit a hospital, there’s a good chance that everything you see has been paid for via our systems and services.
“Our customer support agents are on the front line, making that happen. They deal with around half a million enquiries every year, which can be anything from simply following up an invoice to resolving issues in the supply chain to make sure goods get to where they need to be.
“The benchmarking report compared us with many household names, and the fact we’ve been rated so highly is fantastic news. It’s particularly gratifying to see that our investment in training and providing a great working environment has resulted in huge benefits for our customers, including short waiting times and more than nine out of ten issues being resolved after just one enquiry.”
The CCMA report did highlight some areas for improvement, including the length of the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) automated system navigated by callers.
“This is being changed in the next few weeks,” explained Murphy.
“We’re also taking on board requests from callers to change our hold music – although our goal is that they should never get to the music.
“Our mantra is that if our people are happy, our clients will be too. This report is an endorsement of our approach. But we’re not resting on our laurels – we believe we can always improve, and we’re going to keep on doing just that.”
