April 2022
Alexander House Surgery is a Farnborough based practice servicing nearly 10,000 patients with a wide range of GPs, Nurses and Healthcare Assistants offering many different services.
The Challenge
Alexander House Surgery previously used a standard business VoIP system with fixed extensions. As Practice Manager Patrick Denston points out: "if somebody was working from home, you would still have to lose a telephone somewhere in the surgery for them to log on."
Additionally their previous provider was plagued by reliability issues. Patrick reflects that they "were terrible. After a week we were sick of them."
Patrick elaborates: "For us, it was very unreliable. We had frequent outages. I've been in this surgery for seven months and during the six months of having our previous provider, I was into about 10 outages. And you just couldn't get through to anybody to get an answer. Sometimes you'd get an answer about seven or eight days later when you'd already had to try and find the fault yourself. Regularly went through to American help desks where they didn't have any information on our system at all. We didn't get any metrics either. If we wanted metrics, it was another £800 a month or so, just to find out how many people had called that day and things like that. Quite basic stuff. It just wasn't particularly customer friendly."
The Solution
Surgery Connect is the UK's premier healthcare telephony system, having been designed from the ground up to directly address the needs of practices. Many years of refinement, fuelled by feedback from our 1200+ practices, has resulted in there being no healthcare communications equal. Alexander House Surgery experienced an immediate transformation in the way their patient communications were being handled after their Surgery Connect go-live. Access to "live data so we know how many people are waiting and queuing. That is so important. It's very, very good for that. And then also trend data as well."
Along with Call Recording, Patrick is happy with the "user friendly softphone. Most of the users now have switched to the softphone through choice, rather than because they're working from home. They're sitting at their desks and the actual telephone is fairly redundant."
Surgery Connect's graphical call flow creator, X-flow, has also proved very useful at Alexander House Surgery. For Patrick having a visual representation of the call flow is a "a real game changer. You can say 'Actually, I want to go to this. I want you to then do this.' It's quite intuitive. So really impressed."
As a consequence the patient call experience has substantially improved: "it's significantly easier to get through on the phones, and we're aware when it's busy, it's really quite transparent. There's been a huge decline in people doing online consultations."
Surgery Connect supports single sign-on, so staff do not have to use additional passwords to login. For Patrick this "definitely speeds things up, as previously everybody could have logged on into a softphone, but they didn't because it would've been clunky and not really that useful unless you have your own dedicated workstation. So the single sign-on, and having the telephony users rather than telephony desks, are probably the most useful features for us."
Alexander House Surgery Says
"It is the easiest telephony system I've ever come across.
"The implementation and go-live were very straightforward, very simple. And not too much information, which I'm quite a big fan of. It was quite concise, which made it very quick and easy to do. Yeah, very good.
"The whole setup can all be done online. Everybody has picked up on it very quickly, even the least IT savvy. Most of it's intuitive, so they didn't really need the training.
"And it just works well. It's enough for what we need as a surgery without over complicating with too many different options, when people might think 'Well, there's too many options, I'm not going to play with any of them!'
"It's all been very good. Really happy with it."
Patrick Denston
Practice Manager
Alexander House Surgery
alexanderhousesurgery.com
For further information on Surgery Connect please call Sales on 0333 332 0000.
