Capacity supports the NHS through a global health crisis.

The NHS (National Health Service) is the UK’s publicly funded healthcare system, established in 1948 with the founding principle that healthcare should be free at the point of use for all residents, regardless of income. It is one of the world’s largest single-payer healthcare systems, employing over 1.5 million people. Funded primarily through taxation, the NHS covers everything from GP appointments and emergency care to mental health services and long-term conditions.

Problem

In the event of a national or global health crisis, governments need to be able to act quickly to take control of the situation and swiftly put effective contact channels in place. Crisis situations have the potential to escalate quickly and change daily, so any supporting contact center solutions have to be reliable, innovative, agile and cost-effective.

Capacity’s Agent Guidance platform was selected by the British Government as the best solution to ensure strict process and compliance requirements were met while creating a seamless, user-centric experience for every person the agents spoke to via the UK’s Test & Trace program.

When the Covid-19 pandemic required fast action to help control the spread, the British Government had to find a way to move at pace and support the public in tracking active cases of the disease. The ability to rapidly deploy a brand-new system to fully support contact center agents was a crucial part of their response to the crisis.

Over 20,000 new home-working contact center agents were recruited and many of them had never worked in a contact center before. The new platform, therefore, had to solve 3 specific challenges.

1. Linking legacy systems

With many of the agents never having worked in a contact center before, information being housed across multiple systems, and an anticipated high volume of calls, it was vital that the information agents needed could be accessed quickly and easily to avoid unnecessary increases in handling times. The Government required a solution that would link multiple systems together and present agents with the right information at exactly the right time to enable seamless, reliable, and efficient support for the general public.

2. Meet the strict regulatory criteria for Government projects

For any service provider working on a Government project, they have to be able to demonstrate adherence to strict regulations, often granted in the form of certification or accreditations. With so much potential risk to the Government’s reputation and to the well-being of the public, the selection process for choosing a provider is stringent. For this project, the Government needed to be sure that the company they chose to partner with could meet all regulatory criteria.

Free Resource

Turn Every Coaching Session
Into a Performance Win

Download this ready-to-use call center coaching action plan to help managers run structured, consistent agent reviews that actually drive improvement.

Get the Free Coaching Plan

3. Rapid onboarding of 20,000 agents

Onboarding over 20,000 home-working agents within a matter of weeks created a logistical challenge for agent training, as they had to learn brand new processes and be able to navigate their way easily through them. It was imperative that each call would be handled accurately and efficiently according to important procedural steps.

Expecting agents to memorize processes and scripts before they made and received calls was unrealistic as it was essential that everything moved at pace. The Government needed a solution that would enable faster onboarding and provide reliable support for the agents who were taking the calls.

Solution

The British Government selected our Agent Guidance product, via our partner Sitel, as the CX automation platform that would support their contact center agents through one of the most difficult times in modern history. This platform provided dynamic guidance capabilities so that agents could be presented with the information they needed, exactly when they needed it, reducing call handling times and increasing capacity.

As part of a suite of agent assist tools, Agent Guidance presented the appropriate guidance to agents as they reached out to citizens who may have come into contact with the disease. The agility of the platform and its adaptability to support a large number of users meant that it could be swiftly utilized for other critical incidents, including working with Government agencies where businesses had gone into administration, or when companies had significant data breaches.

If a citizen tested positive for the disease, they received a call from one of the agents who followed a script, guided by Agent Guidance, to explain the isolation steps they had to take. With real-time guidance, the agent was also able to explain the necessary steps and capture the details of anyone who had come into contact with the infected person, enabling them to quickly step in to also contact those citizens.

Across nearly 20,000 agents, Agent Guidance delivered an impressive:

• 57,840,000 script runs per year
• 241,000 script runs per day
• 6,100,000 script runs per month

The benefits of a collaboration with Capacity

Agent Guidance enabled agents with the NHS’ Test and Trace program to capture the details of and follow up with anyone who had come in contact with a person who tested positive for Covid.

Although many of the agents had never worked in a contact center before, let alone a home-based agent position, Agent Guidance gave them the support they needed to confidently navigate through each call. With so many fast-moving situations surrounding the global crisis, the Government was able to trust that each call was being handled in the right way to help protect the public and support the response effort.

See Capacity in Action

Ready to See What
Capacity Can Do?

Get a personalized demo and see how Capacity's AI platform can streamline your support, reduce costs, and delight your customers.

Request a Demo