Despite being an established service, East Devon District Council were struggling to operate their 24/7 monitoring business due to staffing issues, particularly during the night.
Background
East Devon District Council has operated a call monitoring centre for 36 years looking after around 4,000 customers mainly in the East Devon area.
Alongside monitoring technology-enabled care calls, they also manage the installation of personal alarms and their maintenance, faults and out-of-hours services for other areas of the Council including noise complaints. They provide an essential, reliable local service with a community focus.
What was happening
Despite being an established service, East Devon struggled to operate their 24/7 monitoring business due to staffing levels, particularly at night. These issues were having an impact on the team and hindering progress in other areas of service delivery and business growth.
How Night Owl helped
Our Night Owl service was the perfect solution for East Devon. Through Night Owl, we could relieve East Devon’s operating pressures by taking over their call monitoring duties at the time they needed the most assistance – managing all their calls overnight from 10pm – 7am.
How it works
The purpose of Night Owl is to provide sustainability and keep the all-important local connections. We worked around East Devon’s requirements and shift patterns, helping to understand the most cost-effective way of meeting service levels.
Initially, the plan was to implement a trial period for Night Owl monitoring calls three nights a week. Almost as soon as the service began, however, it proved to be such a success that we moved directly to business as usual, with Night Owl in place 7 days a week.
Outcome
As we work closely together in partnership with East Devon, it means we are a trusted and cost-effective alternative to sourcing bank staff with unsociable hours allowance.
- We have relieved pressures on the East Devon team who can now focus their resource throughout the day to expand and deliver a more enhanced service, with time to concentrate on growth.
- We have helped to keep East Devon’s local service sustainable by reducing staffing costs, overheads and safety concerns associated with running a call monitoring centre overnight.
- We are delivering to East Devon’s bespoke needs, ensuring our operators are familiar with their ways of working and most importantly, can assist their customers in the required manner.
Night Owl has been an amazing support solution for our very stretched 24/7 monitoring business. We were struggling to provide full coverage of the service, especially at night. With Night Owl we’re now able to easily relieve team pressure on our operators working around the clock shifts, cover staff absences, ad hoc emergencies, and staff sickness. Moreover, we are now much more confident in providing the type of call monitoring service we think our service users really deserve. Sue Hodges, Manager of Emergency Careline
East Devon District Council
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