Customer Services Team-good nomination

Nomination

Award Category:

Admin & Clerical

Individual or Team Nomination?

Team

Qualifying Qualities

In these challenging times, nominators were asked to show how the nominee had demonstrated the following qualities:

Exceptional work ethic - going above and beyond their job description, especially in the past 12 months.
Outstanding achievement/s in work or outside of the organisation where relevant.
Drive for innovation and proactive leadership in these challenging times.
High level of interpersonal skills, such as kindness, empathy, loyalty and thoughtfulness to staff and patients.
A resilience considering Covid to their role and to the health and wellbeing of their colleagues.

Nominators Answer

Nominee's story :

With everyone in our CCG working remotely, it has been a real challenge keeping the office running on a skeleton staff, most of all when it comes to our reception team receiving calls from members of the public. When lockdown first started, we only had a traditional landline phone system, so most teams were forced to switch to voicemail and email only with only the few teams working from a dedicated team line able to get this forwarded to their mobiles. As a result, a lot/all of those "I want to talk to someone NOW" calls were unable to be routed to anyone but the skeleton staff who were in, or our Customer Services team. Understandably, this means in the early days they got lots of scared callers, but also the many callers who just wanted to help but didn't know how whilst we got our cells and dedicated teams up and running to be able to handle this. Vicky and her team have been amazing in supporting me and the office reception team throughout, whether it's handling calls, helping me with scanning in the entire CCG's post and then forwarding all the dozens of scans on to the right team (sometimes a very real mystery solving task) or helping us figure out what information the Receptionists can give and signpost people towards to help callers right away. This is on top of their day job, which, as I'm sure you can imagine went through a few peaks and troughs. Just like GP's, every single time something new was mentioned in the media (A new symptom! A test! A Vaccine! Priority for Jabs! A lockdown! A side effect!) we would get a huge surge in calls that had nowhere to go yet because we were hearing the news the same time that the public were and still catching up. This is all on top of their normal job, handling complaints, borderline or actual vexatious complainants, SARs requests, assisting with FOI's, and generally having absolutely no let up in standard turnaround times for these requests, despite half the people they needed answers from being incredibly busy dealing with Covid and simply not having capacity to respond as fast as they normally could. Even internally, this led to them being the outlet for a lot of stress and frustration as they had to push for responses from people working extremely long days already dealing with life and death type decisions to answer a question that perhaps should have been able to wait, but couldn't due to strict guidelines. Vicky, Louise, and Chelsie have kept their cool, remained professional, let out their frustrations safely as a team, and generally been absolutely amazing under incredible pressure. Whilst the medical and clinical side teams were fighting Covid, they were holding back the flood of scared public, reassuring them, helping them, and just plain listening, so everyone else could focus on their part and I think they deserve all the awards in the world for that.