We serve them, so they can serve better.

About NHS

North East London NHS Foundation Trust is a mental health and community service institution operated by the NHS Foundation Trust.

NELFT provides an extensive range of integrated community and mental health services for people living in the London boroughs of Barking & Dagenham, Havering, Redbridge and Waltham Forest and community health services for people living in the southwest Essex areas of Basildon, Brentwood, and Thurrock. We provide an Emotional Wellbeing Mental Health Service for young people across the whole of Essex. We are the provider of all-age eating disorder services and child and adolescent mental health services across Kent and Medway.

With an annual budget of £355 million, we provide care and treatment for a population of around 2.15 million. We employ approximately 6,000 staff who work across 210 bases in London, Essex, Kent and Medway.

Our Need

We are the technical support to the HR team within NELFT where service users, clinicians, and various stakeholders can reach out to submit their queries on various products. This first started as a small operation and has since grown to hundreds of conversations in a day. We realized that we needed to organize this process in order to be efficient and scale with the demand. And this was where Zoho Desk came in.

Why Zoho Desk?

At the most fundamental level, Zoho Desk enables us to receive requests from our teams and help them in a timely manner. We love the ability to have a self-service portal where they can look up FAQs and find answers to common questions instantly. When they need personalized attention, they can reach out to us for help and clarifications. It adds to our efficiency that these requests can be automatically assigned to a particular person, so everyone has their work clearly cut out for them. Our response team can also see crucial context like past conversations relating to similar questions. This ensures they give meaningful and thoughtful responses every time.

Data-driven service

As an organization, we are heavily invested in data-driven continuous improvement. Zoho Desk has helped us track and analyze KPIs for our service regularly. On a daily basis, we look at various metrics such as incoming request traffic and our response volume, average response time, and agent performance. We can monitor even minor variations and look at root causes of delayed responses.

Our board and senior leaders also track our efficiency and are able to make critical long-term decisions based on this understanding. Being a large healthcare provider that touches the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens, great service is our norm, and Zoho Desk helps us support our network of care centers in that effort.