Case Studies
Lone worker support
Background
Pinnacle Connect was originally a call centre designed to provide residents with a single point of call to request and receive emergency out of hours maintenance support for their homes. As many of these incidents occurred in the early hours, they often involved lone workers attending properties on their own.
As high profile “lone worker incidences” occurred so too did the pressure on organisations with lone workers, to review the procedures in place and to support such workers. This affected a high number of Pinnacle Connect’s clients and resulted in numerous requests from them to assist them. Pinnacle Connect was ideally placed to offer this support and in 2007 the Lone Worker support service was introduced.
Working with the community
The Chelmer Housing Partnership was one of Pinnacle Connect’s clients that needed this support and was one of the first to use the service and continue to use the service to date. Pinnacle Connect has worked with the Partnership for a number of years, mainly handling out of hours calls from its residents. The Partnership employed over 10 maintenance staff, who Pinnacle Connect would pass on the emergency calls to out of hours. For the majority of their shifts these staff worked on their own and unsupervised. In order to ensure their safety, their supervisors needed to regularly monitor their whereabouts. Pinnacle Connect was well placed to do this, especially as the jobs for the staff concerned were being instructed by Pinnacle Connect Customer Services Agents at the call centre.
By using the Lone Worker Support service, the benefits are two fold. It enables our agents to give more accurate timescales for jobs received out of hours, as the lone worker service tracks each operative from job to job. When an operative receives an emergency callout from Pinnacle Connect, it is logged in to our automated system. Our contact centre staff then actively monitor the user’s login activity until they successfully log out of the system when completed. Should a job take longer than anticipated, the operative can call in to let the call centre know, who in turn can inform the resident waiting for the next service call, of any delay.
As well as offering a better service to the resident, the well-being of the staff, often working well into the early hours and sometimes in rundown areas, is constantly monitored. If a job is taking longer than anticipated and the operative has failed to call in, the Customer Service Agent will call the staff member to make sure all is well. Key coded words are allocated to the staff, to be used to alert the agent to any problems: If used, we will then raise the alarm to the emergency services and the operative’s supervisors as appropriate. As the job had been raised initially by our staff, the agent’s location details are readily available.
Delivering on commitments
The Lone Worker Support service is a vital tool when employing lone workers. Whether it be housing staff, caretakers or area wardens, they are all entitled to the same level of support and assistance as those working in teams.
Recently, a plumber working in an empty property, had been trapped in the property, within a tower block, after hours within a tower block. Had our client not engaged with our service, the cost of this incident would have been greater and the outcome could have been very different.
The plumber had been called out as a result of an out of hours call from the flat below, as she had water coming into her bathroom. The plumber attended the empty property, as instructed, to identify and resolve the leak. As the plumber arrived at the block, he logged into our system, indicating how long he expected to be at the property. After this time expired, our agent was alerted that he had not logged out, or responded to the system reminders and was not answering his mobile number.
The plumber’s manager was immediately provided with the details of the plumber and the address he was attending, for him to check on the operative. On arrival the manager found the plumber had been locked inside the empty property and had no reception on his mobile.
The key to the Lone Worker Service is that we are able to track each operative from job to job and can therefore tell where they are working in cases of emergency situations.
A key element of the Pinnacle Connect’s offering is to reduce clients’ costs, whilst improving the services they provide to their customers. By allowing Pinnacle Connect to co-ordinate the Chelmer Housing Partnership’s (CHP) maintenance operatives, CHP was able to reduce its own internal costs.
The service costs £8 per user per month, which is vastly cheaper than employing a person to oversee and monitor which operatives are where and at what times – which is a job in itself. The other benefit to this is that Pinnacle Connect knows where every operative is because they have passed out the jobs.
Measuring Pinnacle Connect’s success
In addition to the health and safety aspect this service provides, the lone worker service can also monitor performance. For example, the system allows staff to be tracked during their shifts and can be used to identify how long was spent on each job.
The benefit of using Pinnacle Connect’s lone worker service is that the initial stages of the support service are fully automated so timings will be met and reminders and deadlines are not missed. This can never be as robust in a manual system, and therefore it leads to reduced costs.
Our technology is such that we are able to respond immediately to queries the customer may have and our records are, at all times, available for customer inspection. We run a truly accountable and open service.
