Charity Helpline

Our client is a charity for older people, offering information and advice across England on topics such as Social Care, Welfare Benefits, Health and Wellbeing.  A friendship service is also offered to reduce loneliness throughout the UK. The purpose of the helpline is to help older people to live well with dignity, choice and control.

In May 2017 our client outsourced their helpline to Kura.  The team deliver a triage service for all incoming calls across a very wide range of topics along with some varied outbound call work.

The team initially worked in Kura offices before moving to working from home due to the pandemic.

We work in close collaboration with our client and provide a Continuous Improvement Specialist who has been a vital component to the delivery of the services.  Over the last three years, our client has made changes and improvement to processes which have been adapted and updated without difficulty.  Kura ensures our client have the access rights to be able to make some process changes giving them full visibility and the benefit of making changes quickly.

Kura has enabled the client to move substantial elements of service delivery from their head office to the helpline at Kura.

Kura developed and implemented a quality monitoring process that assisted the client to exceed quality standards.

Our partnership with the client to develop their Helpline has produced fantastic results. We met and exceeded the client’s objective that 80% of callers should receive a positive outcome (a benefit check, grants search or both). Quality has consistently been above target for both voice and email channels and our focus and approach with our people and their skill mix is also working well. One of our advisers won the “Helpline Employee of the Year” award at the 2015 Helpline Partnerships conference. 96% of the people we help stated in a recent CSAT survey that they would recommend the Helpline and 95% rated the service as good or very good for “being dealt with in a sensitive and supporting way”.

By focusing on the needs of our customers and aligning the commercial framework to these, we have created a service delivery model that helps reduce the overall cost for the client whilst also ensuring a high level of service being delivered.

We are solely responsible for the inbound helpline and provide the following services:

• Inbound Helpline triage handling a vast range of topics
• Outbound calls
• Vetting of Volunteers
• Continuous Improvement Specialist
• Call Quality Monitoring

Vetting potential volunteers was very manual, containing 5 separate touch points between Kura and the client and required the use of PDFs, Excel and a white board to be maintained. The journey had multiple ‘pain points’ which resulted in multiple repeat calls, referees being phoned after they had already provided a reference and an overall low customer experience

We worked in partnership to map out the customer journey and pain points.  Continuous improvement workshops were held to devise a streamlined version of the entire end to end process.

The streamlined version utilised the efficiencies of Kura’s own technology which removed three of the touch points. Once implemented, the entire process was automated, turning the data into call-backs which were then pushed to agents.  The system prevented customers being called in error and introduced a clear contact history for each customer. Emails were automated and attached to rules to determine when the system should send them, what content they should include and who they should be sent to. Reporting was reviewed and each data point was added to Kura’s database enabling fully automated reporting.

• Number of touch points reduced by 60%
• Over 130 emails per month fully automated in place of being manually created
• All manual reporting was fully automated removing the 2 hours spent consolidating data

The benefit of the partnership between Kura and our client has been described by them:

“We have a great relationship with Kura and their understanding of our service delivery and strategy has always been a priority for them.  Their communication, good working practice, contribution and honesty is highly valued by me and our business.  This was recently demonstrated earlier this year with the move to home working due to the pandemic, which was done with great professionalism, ease and speed to ensure our callers had minimal impact.”