Citizens Advice Scotland turns to Avaya telephony to upgrade customer help
- Summary:
- Citizens Advice Scotland makes a major upgrade to the main system volunteers use to aid callers with NHS issues.
With a network of 61 member ‘bureaux’ and its special consumer helpline, CAS forms the largest independent advice network north of the border, aiding communities from city centres to the Highlands and Islands. (The majority - 86% - of interactions is in local, face to face contact.)
Recently, that special form of community and family help has been extended to provide even higher levels of support, its Chief Operating Officer Anne Lavery told diginomica/government– a move she says circles back to the original reasons she came onboard in the first place:
I joined CAS 3 years ago to deliver better outcomes for people. CAS is an organisation that offers advice to people to help them at challenging periods in their lives, and that was a real motivator for me.
Undoubtedly, we're helping more people than ever before - and this technology allows us to do more.
Specifically, Lavery has commissioned an upgrade for the back end of a popular 0800 helpline service for anyone who wants to give feedback, or raise comments, concerns or complaints about NHS treatment in Scotland.
Dubbed the Patient Advice & Support Service (PASS), PASS is a CAS service all about providing information, advice and support for anyone who wants to have their say on the treatment and care provided by the NHS in Scotland, as well as help users understand their rights and responsibilities as a patient. CAS then works with the NHS in Scotland to improve healthcare provision - work made much easier and more targeted as a result of data and feedback captured by the PASS process, it believes.
In one case, for example, a PASS user contacted Citizens Advice to say they’d been advised by a consultant that a Urine Cytology test result had not been reviewed when it was first carried out. The client was told that if this had been done at the time, the client would not have needed a stoma fitted. A CAS Patient Adviser met with the client, helped them make a complaint using the right NHS guidelines, resulting in an NHS apology and remedial action and full benefit check.
Now, PASS has been quietly boosted via an ability to route calls to and from remote areas in such a way as to allow the CAS team to remain virtual - with no need for any large, expensive centralised call centres to run it, Lavery says.
The virtual call centre we've developed is really agile, and can be deployed and scaled very quickly in response to opportunities that arise.
For me, it was about delivering telephony services in a way that's flexible and cost effective.
‘One Unified, Virtual Team’
The new PASS interface is to be offered as a tool to both paid and volunteer CAS team members right across the country, delivered by IT vendor Avaya.
The latter says it designed the distributed telephony network to meet the most important CAS demand: for a system that could route calls to and from remote areas, seeking capacity in times of high demand, while still being intuitive and easy to use.
In addition, Avaya technology called IP Office provides a one-stop software interface so CAS users don’t need to learn multiple systems or continuously log in and out of different services, claims the supplier.
The result is a service, says Lavery, that allows a group of her advisers to work as one unified virtual team, providing a blend of face-to-face, telephone based and online advice to NHS Scotland users who feel they have a problem with their treatment. Thus PASS lets any user of NHS Scotland contact and interact with a Citizens Advice representative over the phone, via email or web chat through an online portal. The service can also be accessed face to face in a local office (a bureau), or via a helpline staffed by Patient Advisers.
The first iteration of the new Avaya-based PASS links 26 locations, including rural parts of the country where connection speeds can be a challenge. CAS and Avaya say that the underlying architecture, though, can run effectively overall at different quality settings, so maintaining communication over lower connection speeds when needed shouldn’t significantly degrade quality of service.
A Distributed Network
PASS has been tested in action for some months; how has that promise fared in real life? According to Lavery, very well; it’s already helping more clients than originally predicted, 300 calls per month, over three times the originally expected volume. The supplier has also met the service level agreement she insisted on of being able to have over 90% of calls answered within 30 seconds, she adds.
PASS allows the Citizens Advice network in Scotland to provide a multi-channel offer which is responsive to client demands while maximising productivity, delivering real value for money. The 0800 number is an essential service for anyone who is not happy with the treatment they’ve received from the NHS in Scotland and needs free, confidential, and independent advice Distributed telephony also allows us to use skills nationally, without undermining local delivery.
This all checks out, according to one advisor, Sarah Walker from the East Renfrewshire Citizens Advice Bureau.
I have found this to be an easy, efficient and user friendly system. The visual elements, such as the screen layout and the icons, are very clear and self-explanatory, so little training is required for potential users. It’s responsive and consistent, as you can see when calls are being received and the how long the current caller is waiting. You can also communicate with other users and supervisors, which is beneficial and useful in providing additional support.
Finally, in terms of next steps, Lavery says some of the CAS bureaux have shown an interest in coming on to the telephony platform:
At the moment we are working out how we can expand the offer in a way that benefits the wider network.