Meridian engaged in work with this Trust on the third occasion, working with Children and Young People’s Service, with the aim of reducing the amount of unanswered calls and complaints made due to communication. Prior to Meridian becoming involved in the project, the admin team were handling calls, each locality had their own approach and an average of 17% of calls were missed, with up to 38% in one of the localities.
The Trust were happy to start working with Meridian again, without an analysis being carried out. As the area of work was small, they were well aware of the problems that existed and the project would involve the implementation of a new service.
The programme sold was a 12 week Improvement Project. The overall goals of the project were as follows.
- Reduce the amount of unanswered calls
- Reduce the number of complains made due to poor communication
Meridian worked with the management team within the Trust through a series of meetings and workshops. During these various sessions a new management control system was designed to ensure effective running of the New Call Handling Department within CYPS.
The key focus was to implement management controls to decrease the number of unanswered calls thus reducing the number of complaints made about communication. Thanks to a process of putting together pathways for calls and scripts for each call type, and then directing the calls in the right way without creating additional work for other departments, the managers were equipped with expectations in regards to a good follow up.
Management dashboard was created to help assess performance against plan in terms of call duration, average time to answer, number of missed calls. Managers were now reviewing the variances and taking daily actions on them, for example at peak times there was a need for an extra call handler but at quieter times, where two call handlers were initially rostered, the shift was reduced to only one to meet the demand of the service with existing staff.
The processes introduced and implemented gave the management of the Call Handling function a better control over the proactive governance of the call handling system. Telephony reports were used to create a dashboard to forecast the volume of calls, expected duration and hourly pattern, thus allowing for planning of the correct number of resources to be scheduled to answer the calls at the right time. A set of pathways and scripts were designed and implemented to manage the assignment of work. Daily call reports are utilised on a daily basis to review Performance on a daily basis and plan the day ahead. Daily, weekly, and monthly performance review meetings have been installed, reviewing against targets; time to answer call and time on calls. Imbedding the planned versus actual review philosophy within the organisation.
The main results of the programme are:
- Systematic working across the Trust
- Unanswered calls drooped by over 16%
- The number of communication complaints dropped
- Staff feel that the service functions much better
- Reduction in the number of unnecessary emails being sent