Streamlined and efficient service experience for NHSBT

A data management challenge
With more than 5,500 staff members in 93 locations across the UK, managing vast amounts of employee and asset data is a massive task – even more so when combined with a constant quest to do more with less while maintaining quality and meeting high user expectations.

NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) is an essential part of the National Health Service (NHS), providing blood donation services for England and organ donation services for the UK. This includes managing the donations, storage, and transplantations of blood, organs, tissues, bone marrow, and stem cells, as well as researching new treatments and processes.

The pioneering developments by scientific and clinical teams at NHSBT are critical to helping improve patient outcomes and provide potentially life-saving treatment. Achieving this successfully involves well-developed and efficient internal processes, effective use of data, and the ability to access services and maintain standards irrespective of the user’s location. NHSBT was already using ServiceNow products in parts of its operation, but deployment was fragmented. The platform was underutilized; opportunities were being missed.

The need for a foundation
NHSBT had key issues to resolve. In particular, it needed a more effective way to harness the huge amounts of data it had at its disposal. Doing so would enable it to better capture analytical insights and use them to ensure that its internal operations ran smoothly across the country.

Accurate data is also critical to the seamless allocation of devices and facilities across each NHSBT location. Poor data quality and an extensive backlog meant asset deployment was inefficient and causing unnecessary costs. NHSBT also had to navigate the challenges of COVID-19 and evolve its processes to support employees working from home, facilitate remote patient visits and warehousing admin, and ultimately provide the best possible care remotely.

When Donna Lea-Dodd joined NHSBT as Assistant Director of Live Services in 2019, she quickly identified her main objectives. “The task was to improve customer service to NHSBT colleagues,” she says. “We needed to provide a foundation, reduce manual overheads to ensure that people do more with what they have, and ensure that they had performant and available services.”

Great workflow, great user experience
Working with ServiceNow and technology delivery partner Engage ESM, Donna realized that effective groundwork would be critical to success. “We had to cleanse and populate data,” she notes. “Also, manual updates and changes don’t provide enough accuracy, so we automated and added systems to update and check data.”

Behind every great experience is a great workflow – and Donna’s work paid off. NHSBT’s enhanced services portal unifies the employee service experience into a single online destination for all staff to access the help or information they need. Employees can launch the portal to instantly access a range of organization-wide services, wherever they are, through a desktop, laptop, or mobile web browser.

Examples include users being able to complete online workstation assessments, query a figure on their payslip, or raise a request for new IT equipment. Workflows and automated processes route the queries to the most appropriate team, with no human intervention required.

Other departments share the benefits
NHSBT can now track assets quickly and easily, providing a full picture of where each one is and enabling them to be updated from a security viewpoint. The automation process has also improved customer service: the use of live data means requests that would previously have taken days to process are now handled instantly, while dashboards enable full visibility of service performance.

Within a year, ServiceNow had saved 650 hours of valuable NHSBT agent time, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks and improve the overall service for patients. “The team can now focus on more complex tasks that can’t be automated,” says Mahesh. “The overall experience for users and high-volume requests is much better.”

The platform’s update schedule has been accelerated from four per year to monthly, with each one eliminating more manual processes, speeding up the service process for employees, and enhancing the overall experience. “Other departments are now asking if using ServiceNow is an option for their services,” concludes Donna. “It’s expanding across directorates, and they are increasingly joining up and sharing the benefits.”

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