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Cutting Costs

Our small regional network of surgeries was struggling. We had over 3000 patients to service across 6 local surgeries.

Health

Despite being tasked with reducing operational spend, we remained committed to maintaining a quality level of service.

That meant, answering calls in a timely manner, protecting patient records, ensuring a reliable broadband connection and being flexible with the way we offered services. We knew we had to do more with less, like so many other public sector organisations but didn’t really know how.

The Challenge

Cutting costs in any business is always a challenge but life in the public sector has never been harder – the government reforms have placed even greater emphasis on doing more for less across almost every organisation, including our network of local surgeries.

Faced with some redundancies, we were forced to look at our operating costs with a magnifying glass. We found that we were dividing our telecoms spend across 4 suppliers, not sharing information efficiently so duplicating an enormous amount of work and to make matters even worse, we’d been paying for services we didn’t even need anymore.

The first thing we did is look at accredited frameworks such OGC Buying Solutions for our voice calls and lines. We even checked Value Wales to make sure we hadn’t missed anyone – TalkTalk Business was highlighted as a market leader across them all, offering not just some services but all of them.

Admittedly, we didn’t know where to start and had very little time to both understand our communication requirements or onboard a new provider. The experienced team at TalkTalk Business are already proven in this arena with over 200 Public Sector and NFP organisations already trusting them with their communication requirements. You can tell too – from the beginning they understood our challenges and proposed solutions that would work not just for our budget but operationally in line with our processes too.

The Solution

Once TalkTalk Business had digested our entire telecoms spend, they came back to us with a solution to reduce our call spend by around 15% by leveraging voice traffic over their Next Generation Network, now the most connected in the UK. They also suggested an IPVPN which would not only deliver a superfast broadband connection to the internet but connect our sites and homeworkers efficiently so everybody could access information from wherever they were, far more quickly and easily from one central site, 24/7.

Our out-dated telephone system was actually loosing calls and the cost to maintain or upgrade it was almost as much as buying a more nimble system. The solution Opal delivered was ideal and coupled with some ‘cloud’ based (so you only pay for what you need) call handling services such as Contact Manager has made our lives much easier for staff and customers alike. Caller complaints are down by 20% due to reduced queuing times and less complaints to deal with means a happier team who are finally working more efficiently.

Still need more information?

Talk to one of our UK based advisors on:

0800 954 5708