NHS Business Services Authority considering a 24-hour virtual contact centre after trial with AWS

Amazon's cloud-based chatbot meant that more staff time could be devoted to value-add services

The NHS Business Services Authority receives millions of phone calls each year - which is understandable for the body responsible for delivering primary care dental and prescription services to all UK citizens, as well as administrative tasks like payroll and pensions for the NHS workforce.

The NHSBSA also handles applications for the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) scheme, which represent a significant amount of the 5 million calls its Newcastle-based contact centre handles each year.

Chief digital officer Darren Curry, speaking at the AWS Public Sector Summit in London this month, described how the organisation adopted a cloud-based chatbot service to lower call response times and improve staff morale.

Many of the EHIC calls to NHSBSA are simple, only requiring a yes or no response. The first chatbot experiments, in November last year using AWS Connect, were aimed at handling these types of queries.

AWS describes Connect as ‘a contact center as a service (CCaS) solution', which establishes a virtual contact centre to direct calls to specific operatives. It can also be used with the Amazon Lex chatbot technology to answer calls, as well.

NHSBSA ran a three-week proof of concept during the traditionally slow period at the end of the year. Set up took two weeks with the help of NHSBSA's partner Arcus Global.

Initially the system was only active during business hours, but ran full-time over the final five days.

"We received just short of 11,000 calls, over the three weeks, [and] 4,300 calls were fully resolved by Lex. That is a 42 per cent success rate," said Curry. He added that of those 11,000 calls, only about 660 were dropped, while about 5,000 of the callers opted to be passed on to human staff.

That means that more than half of the callers were happy to deal with a chatbot, and Curry considers that a success. He said that the effect on contact centre staff has also been very positive:

"[Our staff] want to be delivering value calls, so it was a really positive experience. They look to resolve calls as quickly as possible, but it enabled them to get a better sense of self-gratification by dealing with those more value-add service queries," he said.

After his keynote, Curry told Computer Weekly that his organisation uses an agile approach to new technology deployments: if it works, great, but if not they will let it go and move on.

He said that NHSBSA is now considering how to move forward from the successful trial, and is considering a 24-hour service.