#Service Matters: Delivering excellent service to customers and suppliers
Delivering excellent service to our customers and suppliers is a cornerstone of our work to deliver for value for the NHS. Ensuring issues are dealt with quickly and rectified are part of the key performance indicators that our team is measured against.
As part of our #ServiceMatters campaign, we sat down with Sally Bratley, Senior Product Assurance and Contract Manager, to find out more about her team and how they deliver quality service to customers and suppliers.
"We have a great dedicated help desk team within Facilities and Office Solutions, and we work really hard to deliver quality services. Each of our assistant buyers on the help desk is assigned to a different category, using their knowledge and relationships they have built with suppliers, and being familiar with the terms and conditions those suppliers operate under to deal with issues and contain complaints efficiently.
"Our support desk team are relatively new to NHS Supply Chain, but they have worked incredibly hard to develop their knowledge, and they are great at sharing their learning and experience with one another and sharing experience from other issues that they have been involved in resolving. We are hoping to expand our team by recruiting another procurement graduate in the near future.
"The helpdesk team manage any customer or supplier issues that are aligned to their specific categories, our KPI measures how long it takes from when we initially receive the complaint to containing it, which means having a plan in place as to how we are going to resolve it. So, for example with furniture, a customer may contact us to say there is an issue with a particular piece of furniture, it may not necessarily need to be replaced, the supplier may be able to fix it. So, we contact the supplier to arrange an engineer to go to the trust and fix the equipment. We can then respond to the customer to see if they are satisfied with our course of action, and we can then mark the complaint as contained. We can then close the issue once the work has been conducted and the customer is satisfied.
"I’m proud of how hard our team works to ensure we deliver good service to our customers and suppliers. Since I have taken over the management of the help desk, we have maintained a 100% record against our KPI of containing issues, whether it is classed as a patient safety issue or not; that is testament to our commitment to providing excellent service to our customers."