NHS Health Scotland Implements Chat on Your Website Software

Healthy Working Lives is a free and confidential NHS service to help employers understand, protect and improve the health and wellbeing of their workforce. They also help employees with health problems to remain in work or return to work.

Digital Transformation

At the end of 2016 the Scottish Government published their Health and Social Care Delivery Plan[1] which set out their objectives for the next 5 year period.  With their aim to provide high quality services to Scotland, focusing on prevention, early intervention and supported self-management and enhancing their health and social care services, they set out priorities for NHS Boards.

Therefore National Health Scotland were contractually obliged to provide live chat on their Healthy Working Lives website from 1st June 2018.

Choosing Click4Assistance

After our previous work with National Services Scotland for the Fit For Work Scotland website, National Health Scotland were already aware of our company and services, therefore it was a logical step for them to use live chat through us.

All visitor facing aspects are 100% customisable, therefore the windows have been customised with the information they want to display and Healthy Working Lives’ logo on the dialogue window. The prechat form contains a confidentiality terms and conditions disclaimer, to ensure GDPR compliance they include a link to find out how the organisation holds and uses the data individuals provide when they initiate a chat. 

Using Chat in an Advisory Environment

Live chat on your website is a private and secure one-to-one communication channel, which allows individuals to confidently gain advice. Unlike telephone or email where identifiable information is recorded as soon as the engagement is initiated, advisory services such as Healthy Working Lives have opted to just request a first name. This allows enquirers to receive help and to disclose as much personal information as they feel comfortable sharing.

When advising, operators have the ability to redirect the visitor’s browser to the information they require if it is readily available on the website. The relevant page will automatically open in a new tab, helping individuals to quickly and easily find the information. This is particularly useful for organisations such as Healthy Working Lives as many forms and information packs make up their online resources.

Some advisory organisations may also use this functionality to redirect them to a ‘safe website’ if the need arises, similar to the ‘close this site’ button that will navigate them to a site such as Google or the BBC.

Representatives also have access to functionality that can improve their productivity and therefore help advise more enquirers at any one time. Firstly as chat is text based, more than one session can be handled by an operator simultaneously, as individuals’ type at different speeds and their enquiries are of various natures, some more complex than others.

Secondly, if Ghost Text has been enabled, the representative will be able to view what the visitor is typing in real time as they are composing their message. This helps operators to foresee what their enquiry regards which allows them to prepare their responses. However, if whilst composing their message an individual changes their mind about what information they share, the member of staff cannot refer directly to any of the details they may have seen to respect their privacy. It does give the representative an idea of what is perhaps at the forefront of the enquirer’s mind and instead they could prompt the visitor to talk about it by asking related questions.

For example with a healthcare service, if a visitor has started to type out they have a certain symptom but then remove this, if the representative feels this is important to talk about, they could perhaps ask at a natural point within the conversation whether they have experienced the following, listing a few symptoms including the one they mentioned.

Lastly, to speed up their response time operators can use pre-defined replies to answer repetitive or frequently asked questions. Providing quicker replies can increase customer satisfaction rates as they are not waiting for a lengthy period of time for their answers and allows the representative to offer advice to more people.

Click4Assistance has been providing live chat on your website software for over 10 years, helping health organisations such as NHS CWP, BMI Healthcare and NHS Arden and GEM CSU offer advice and help to their online visitors. For more information about NHS Health Scotland’s implementation or the live chat solution contact our team on 01268 524628 or email theteam@click4assistance.co.uk.

[1] Scottish Government, 2016, Health and Social Care Delivery Plan