Bringing a contact centre to support clients can be difficult in the best of times.
Usually, people who resort to contacting are often frustrated that they have an issue with their service or product they need help on.
Therefore, removing any additional things that would add to the annoyance, like chats dropping out of connection, is vital.
This is all the more important when the people contacting you are seeking help for a mental health crisis.
That's why when Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust (Mersey Care) wanted to transform its CCaaS solutions, it saw Webex as one of the partners that could help deliver that service.
Mersey Care's Capabilities
Mersey Care is one of the largest providers of physical and mental health services in North West England.
It serves more than 1.4 million people across over 200 sites throughout the region.
As part of this 'striving for perfect care' initiative, Mersey Care wanted to develop a dedicated 24/7 urgent mental health crisis helpline to support communities throughout Merseyside.
This planned transformation began in 2020 ahead of schedule to help with the growing mental health issues the Covid lockdowns induced.
The expedited need was further exacerbated by Mersey Care's existing technology, which did not allow clinicians to meet the needs of key NHS directives operationally.
For instance, the one-hour / four-hour response directive, part of NHS England's urgent and emergency care recovery plan, is the ambition to improve 76% of patients being admitted, transferred, or discharged within four hours.
Equally, other issues revolved around diversion from Accident and Emergency Services or the pending increased volume forecasted by the delivery of the National NHS111 (Press 2 for Mental Health) pathway.
The technology platform they needed therefore required greater resilience, multi-channels and flexibility to support a generative AI technology approach to reduce risk and improve the service user experience by improving staff capabilities.
The Webex Edge
Mersey Care partnered with digital consultancy ITGL to help them develop the crisis helpline for the future.
Together, they worked to apply the latest innovations in technology continuously over their work together. The project is now entering its fourth year.
During this time, the ITGL team worked with Mersey Care to design and implement a Cisco Webex Contact Center solution, completing the migration to the cloud-based platform in November 2022.
With Webex, they were able to implement
- Call routing capabilities enable urgent calls to be prioritised over lower acuity calls
- Utilising text-to-speech features for quicker updating of recorded messages
- A dedicated Emergency Services line to provide a direct line to those in the field
- Real-time and historical data and reports accessed within the Webex Contact Center Analyzer
Equally, they were able to utilise the capabilities of the Webex platform to embed web pages that use the technology of the what3words geo-locator application, helping emergency services locate 114 people for rescue up until September 2024.
But perhaps most importantly, the trust now had a flexible, future-proof solution upon which they could continue to build.
