Kent Community Health

Giving customers a great self-service experience

KCHFT’s IT department has been using TOPdesk since 2016. Their biggest success with TOPdesk? Utilising the self-service portal with other departments to create a streamlined experience for their end users.

Richard Lawrence, IT Service Support Centre Manager, describes their operations. “We have ten operators receiving calls, and on top of that there are field engineers, teams for networks, servers, telecoms, projects and more. As a trust, we’re very forward thinking: we look for new initiatives and think about how to improve services. At the same time, keeping costs low is a significant driving force in the sector.”

“Self-service has become more important for service desks. The usability of the Self-Service Portal was a significant factor in choosing TOPdesk.” KCHFT mainly uses TOPdesk as a call management system; and the IT team soon found opportunities to make good use of the customisable forms. “Communication for our telecoms service, for instance, used to depend on paper-based forms, emails and spreadsheets. We transferred the paper-based forms into electronic forms in TOPdesk, and now everything telecom-related is pushed through the portal. It’s significantly easier.”

User-friendly processes

“People really love the portal for its ease of use – and it looks great! It’s not over-fiddly, and it only takes a few clicks to find what you’re looking for. When you enter the user’s name, the information is populated from the Active Directory, leaving you to describe the problem and categorize the call. Having that knowledge at our fingertips helps you build a quick rapport with the end user – and this is reflected in our reports.”

End users are able to give feedback following every call closure. “User feedback’s been overwhelmingly positive. Our reports for customer service are always high, with over 90% reporting a great experience, which always comes down to the dedication and commitment of our team. We’re always tweaking the portal, looking for ways to make make it even easier to use – particularly with the latest mobile functionality.” Richard has also recently introduced Problem Management processes, to better support incident analysis and evaluation.

Letting services work for different teams

KCHFT has created separate services for specific teams, offering tailored information to end users, all hosted within the same environment. This included a service area for all general IT related issues, a separate one for Surrey and Borders, and one for the Community Information System (CIS). The CIS is one of the main applications the trust uses for electronic patient management and coordinating patient care; it’s more of a niche specialism, so they have unique forms and tailored services that go beyond the more generic IT fixes.”

Keeping it simple

Richard’s plans for the portal include making it the main hub of IT. “If an end user wants to request a new piece of equipment, they can just go to one portal and find the information there. The portal is so easy for them to use. The new starter process could now be improved along the same principles: for example, currently we have to log separate requests for IT, CIS, and also HR. We could do all of that within one form! And I’d like to start using more extensive changes. You can have one change with multiple paths from that request, leading to different tasks. It’ll be just one more process we’re making better.”