Nuffield Health has grown substantially in recent years and its contact centre was no longer up to the task. If it wanted to switch to a new platform, December – a traditionally quiet month – would be the ideal time. But, with year-end fast approaching, Andrea Gray, director of service delivery at Nuffield Health, knew there was no time to lose.

Timescales were tight but BT stepped up to the challenge. A BT Optimise Cloud Contact solution for 180 agents was implemented in just six weeks. With new-found business agility, it’s just what the doctor – and Andrea – ordered.

Nuffield Health is the leading UK health charity. Its mission is to help people get healthy and stay healthy. 

The company has grown rapidly with the acquisition of the Cannons gymnasium chain, while continuing to evolve Nuffield hospitals and its proactive healthcare services. It now offers a wider range of health services than anyone else in the UK, delivered through a network of over 100 facilities. 

These include private hospitals, health clinics, fitness and wellbeing centres, and diagnostic units, as well as over 200 corporate onsite centres for fitness and wellbeing.

A key focus for Nuffield Health is providing regular health assessment and screening services, mainly for corporate clients. 

At the heart of the business, there's a contact centre. This:  

• makes outbound calls to people to remind them that a health assessment is due
• receives incoming calls from customers enquiring about services and making appointments
• handles calls from people wishing to schedule cosmetic surgery and physiotherapy appointments.

However, there were limitations with the company’s existing contact centre arrangements. 

Andrea explains: “Our legacy contact centre platform was not sufficiently scalable to meet future business needs, and we had concerns about resilience. Furthermore, retrieving call recordings was a time consuming process, and we couldn’t get detailed management information to help us run the business. We needed something better.”

With limited capital funding, Nuffield Health needed to fund the new solution from operating expenditure. Time was of the essence, as there was only a short window of opportunity to select and implement the new contact centre platform. 

“December is a quiet time for us because few people want to think about health assessment in the run up to Christmas,” says Andrea. 

“That’s the ideal time for us to change over to a new system, but the timeframe was ridiculously short.”

The perfect fit was BT Optimise Cloud Contact, a fully hosted web-based virtual contact centre solution capable of supporting over 1,000 agents. 

“We chose the BT Optimise Cloud Contact platform because it offered all the functionality we needed and its pay-as-you-go model met our operational expenditure funding requirement too,” adds Andrea. 

“The size, reputation, and capability of BT to respond in the short timescale were other significant factors.”

With BT Optimise Cloud Contact: 

• incoming voice calls can be blended with email, web chat, co-browsing, and call-back requests in a universal queue
• there are no hardware constraints – the solution has the ability to scale up and down and it requires no physical infrastructure or software on site 
• there are a range of advanced features, such as interactive voice response for customer self-service and skills-based routing
• it can be integrated with back office systems via an open application programming interface.

BT appointed a project manager to work on-site and engaged BT Advise Contact specialists to advise Nuffield Health on configuration and set-up. 

Andrea says: “We didn’t simply want to replicate our old environment. BT helped us review our call routing and agent skillsets and gave us some excellent advice to help improve workflow for greater efficiency and productivity.”

The BT Optimise Cloud Contact platform serves 180 agents spread across two main contact centres in Chichester and New Malden, as well as some in remote locations such as medical centres. 

Calls are delivered via BT Inbound Contact, enabling Nuffield Health to optimise call handling using customer specific non-geographical numbers. Outbound calls were consolidated onto BT lines against a calling plan optimised for Nuffield Health. 

BT provides 24/7 support for the whole solution.

The project took just six weeks from concept to delivery, with workgroups migrating from the old platform to BT Optimise Cloud Contact one-by-one over a few days. 

According to Andrea: “The transition went smoothly, helped enormously by the BT people on site supporting us during go-live. Having a dedicated BT project manager working with us from the inception was also a big benefit.”

The new BT Optimise Cloud Contact solution for Nuffield Health regularly handles upwards of 70,000 inbound and outbound calls per month. 

With comprehensive management information readily available it’s now much easier for Nuffield Health to monitor and manage contact centre performance to ensure the right resources are available at the right time. 

“It’s so much more efficient,” Andrea reports. 

“Since we took BT Optimise Cloud Contact we’ve seen our cost per call reduce by 15%.”

Agent performance has improved too. With call recordings now easier to access, Nuffield Health has increased the call sample it audits for quality to identify staff training and coaching needs. The result is a 7% improvement in call quality ratings, with a corresponding improvement in customer satisfaction. 

BT Optimise Cloud Contact has also met the scalability challenge. Agents can be literally anywhere - any company site, at home, or even on the move. The only equipment needed is a headset-equipped PC or laptop with an internet connection.

Using that capability, Nuffield Health is planning to add more virtual agents across the country, capitalising on spare capacity among its workforce wherever people may be, rather than recruiting additional people centrally. Being able to make use of this spare time, particularly to make outbound calls, will help Nuffield Health generate new business. 

The introduction of home working, which BT Optimise Cloud Contact supports, is also being considered.

BT is also assisting Nuffield Health by developing the BT Optimise Cloud Contact platform to integrate with its salesforce.com CRM application. This will provide Nuffield Health with better customer visibility across its divisions, enabling it to cross-sell and upsell its services more effectively. 

Andrea sums up: “With BT Optimise Cloud Contact, we have a more agile and resilient contact centre platform that’s helped reduce costs and increase efficiency while improving customer service.”