Case Study: Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust achieves 85% fewer internal switchboard calls and 53% first-time external routing with Netcall ContactPortal

Liberty Converse deployed to take the strain in the face of the Covid pandemic

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust faced overwhelming call volumes across three busy hospital sites and a 20-person, 24/7 switchboard team during the COVID-19 surge. The Trust, already upgrading its contact centre, turned to Netcall’s ContactPortal to provide an immediate front‑end greeting and operator speech bot to relieve switchboard pressure and separate urgent calls — the ContactPortal front end went live within a week.

Netcall implemented ContactPortal to handle both internal and external calls, quickly routing callers and reducing load on operators; internal calls to switchboard fell by 85%, the speech bot directed 53% of external calls to the right extension first time in month one, and May 2020 saw the switchboard answer 4,000 calls versus 53,000 in May 2019 while ContactPortal handled 36,000. The deployment freed staff for other IT and admin tasks, cut shift staffing, and improved patient and staff experience.

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Louise Simpson

Head of Telecommunications