#TrustMatters Blog: Building relationships with our customers
Our focus for November is #TrustMatters. To introduce this topic, Liessa Newnham, Head of Regional Implementation and Adoption for NHS Supply Chain: Facilities and Office Solutions, discusses the importance of maintaining good relationships with our customers and colleagues and understanding the needs of NHS trusts to deliver the best possible service.
For me, having sat on the other side of the fence as a Trust end user, the key things I instil in my team are responsibility and trust. When customers come to us, they want an honest answer, a quick response and good solid information. NHS trusts are under immense pressure, and they don’t have time to be let down.
My team and I provide an interface between the regular contact of the NHS Supply Chain ICS managers with their NHS Trusts, and our busy procurement team. If a Trust or the ICS Manager needs information, we provide an interface as a first point of call so the procurement team can keep busy working on their tenders, reviewing frameworks or chasing up and sourcing new suppliers.
Quite often we are able to provide the answers to those initial questions but if the enquiry needs a more complex response with more detail like contract information, we can take that request to the procurement team directly.
The Implementation and Adoption team’s relationship with trusts and the wider business is essential to ensure customers are getting the support and information they need.
One of the key things I ask of my team is reliability, if they get a customer enquiry they should respond by the end of the day, even if it’s only to say we’re working on it, and we look to get a full response within 24 hours. Sometimes it takes us a while to track down the person we need to find the right information, sometimes we need to contact a supplier and it can be time consuming to find the information our customers need, but I am very conscious that trusts are under a lot of pressure and don’t necessarily have the time to wait.
Understanding the needs of our customers is an essential part of my team’s roles, we all come from commercial backgrounds and have worked in customer facing environments before joining the NHS, and its one of the things I look for when recruiting is someone, who has the ability to understand what the customer’s requirements are. Sometimes what people ask for, is not necessarily what they need, and we try and find the best solution for them.
I like to think one of the ways we build trust is by being honest with our customers, if we’re not the right person, we point them in the right direction, and that might be another area of NHS Supply Chain, it may be NOE CPC or a supplier, so we can honestly assess what the customer is asking for and meet their needs.
A particularly important part of our role is to sit and listen and understand the internal dynamics of the NHS trusts we are working with; what the key issues are and what their drivers are. We are trying to build a picture of the trusts we are working with, understanding the people, some want lots of information, some want a quick overview in bullet points. It’s very much around understanding and listening to the customer to begin with, find out what they want and then taking that information away and bringing them back a solution.
NHS trusts are complex working areas, they have fast moving, busy departments and the people working there have their own responsibilities to meet. There can be a lot of people involved in the decision making, from clinical to procurement to operational to strategic. Our job is to get them what they need, it is about building those partnerships, not just with NHS trusts but also with Suppliers and with our local ICS Managers within NHS Supply Chain.
The Implementation and Adoption team aim to be the hub of the wheel; there’s NHS Supply Chain, our NHS trust customers, Suppliers and NOE CPC, my team sits within the middle of all that and we use the resources and information we’ve got to provide the right solution. While a lot of our work is about making savings, it’s also about ensuring customers are informed about quality products, better prices, and better opportunities.
The people that we work with in the trusts are just fantastic, and their efforts during the recent pandemic were truly heroic and the more we can do to help make their roles easier the better. We’ve got to deliver for NHS Supply Chain, and we’ve got to make our savings, but I do feel that by delivering what we’re passionate about, that happens anyway. It is a real privilege to work with our NHS partners and to deliver solutions that help them buy better by getting the right products to the right people quickly at the best possible price.
To find out more, visit the dedicated webpages for our Facilities and Office Solutions contracts, or contact our CMSP Support Desk.