01.02.13
Calling the shots
Source: National Health Executive Jan/Feb 2013
The GMC achieved the best score in the public sector in the biggest ever benchmarking exercise for customer service within UK contact centres. NHE discusses its success with Jane Durkin, the GMC’s head of registration enquiries and support.
In a recent benchmarking exercise, UBM’s ‘Top 50 Call Centres for Customer Service’, in which research company GfK made tens of thousands of ‘mystery shopping’ enquiries to more than 50 of the UK’s leading contact centres, the General Medical Council came in the top 10 nationally and got the best result in the public sector.
As part of the annual study, now in its fi fth year, each contact centre was rated using more than 50 criteria across fi ve key areas of service – timeliness, ease of use, reliability, staff knowledge and personalised service – and awarded a customer service rating in percentage terms. The GMC achieved a score of 92.45% in the exercise.
About 80% of its callers are doctors, most of them registered and practising in the UK, but some more technical calls come from doctors seeking registration, based on where they live, where they’ve studied, and their nationality.
But, as Jane Durkin, head of registration enquiries and support told NHE, about 5-10% of calls are from members of the public.
“Some may have a very routine enquiry – it might be about registration, those are few and far between. Often, it will be somebody who wants to make a complaint about a doctor. That could be quite a routine query, or they can be in varying states of distress: those calls could be about dealing with somebody who is vulnerable or feeling vulnerable.
“We get quite a healthy number of registration checks from employers and possible employers doing pre-employment checks, or maybe they’ve got a fi tness-for-practice query. They may be concerned that they have somebody who isn’t a registered doctor who is seeking employment. For those queries, we do statutory checks through the police.
“Very few calls are transferred, because we like to resolve a call when we receive it. We never tell anybody how many calls they must take, or how long a call must be: the call will take as long as it takes, the focus is quality.
“We’re conscious that doctors pay for this service so we don’t want to be handing them round to other people – the vast majority of calls are resolved at fi rst point of contact.”
One of the biggest changes to doctors’ working lives in years, revalidation, is now offi cially in place, and the GMC has a leading role in making it a success. The GMC contact centre has a separate team of revalidation experts.
Durkin said: “For the bulk of doctors it hasn’t raised a great many queries, it’s just something that has to go into their mainstream practice.
“But many doctors are saying ‘I don’t know how this works for me’ – they’re overseas or need UK registration because this is what an overseas regulator wants, or they’re coming up to retirement and want to know how the timing works, or they work for lots of organisations so don’t know who their responsible offi cer is.
“We’ve had nearly 20,000 calls this year about revalidation alone, so have bulked up our advisors this year as a specialist team.
“Our expectation is that as revalidation becomes the norm, that team will shrink and become part of our mainstream contact centre.”
The team of 35-40 takes about 200,000 calls and 100,000 emails a year, although increasingly doctors are ‘self-serving’ online, making routine transactions and address changes online.
Annual call volumes are down from 250,000 about three years ago, Durkin said, though email volumes are up.
The next stage is increasing the contact centre’s social media presence, she said.
She praised the quality of the feedback given in the benchmarking exercise. “It’s helpful for us to make sure that we deliver really goodquality customer service”, she said – but added that the GMC doesn’t generally use the word ‘customer’ for the doctors and members of the public contacting it. “But as industry jargon, it’s hard to avoid!” she said.
Commenting on the GMC’s top score in the benchmarking exercise, she said: “We were absolutely delighted: we came top among other public sector organisations, and against everybody we came ninth.
“We’ve still got lots to do, but it’s been a real boost in terms of the progress we’ve made.
“What we want is that when anybody contacts us, for them to feel they’ve got more confi dence in us after they’ve spoken to us than before.
“That is measured as part of this process.
“For many doctors we are very conscious that our reputation, or their fear of us, is something that might drive their perception, but we have a chance to influence that and put a human face to it.
“It has raised our profile and that’s really good for the people who work in the contact centre.”
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