About Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit (MLCSU)
The MLCSU Service Desk supports approximately 35,000 users across health and care, including some 24/7 services. Monthly, the team handle around 8,700 telephone contacts, 1000 live chat interactions and 600 chatbot inquiries. The team log about 5,550 incidents and 11,250 service requests monthly, with an average resolution time of just under two hours.
“MLCSU’s highly skilled and innovative IT team delivers comprehensive service desk support to ensure that every user experience with our IT service is smooth and productive. We have developed and matured a customer-focused approach to service delivery that is responsive, efficient, scalable and customisable to requirements. “
We offer customers a seamless, multichannel delivery experience which is responsive to their individual needs, established through our service delivery management team, KPI data, direct feedback and user/working groups.
✅ Time to Align to The Global Best Practice Standard
“It was identified there was a need to adopt a standard maturity model to drive CSI and improve the maturity of our services to a quality standard. The SDC programme will identify areas and methods of continual improvement, which we have a commitment to driving across our entire IT service directorate. The adoption of the globally recognised Standard underpinned our long term strategic objectives. Achieving the standard would enable us to be competitive in the market place.”
✅ Defining, Documenting and Streamlining Processes
“One of the biggest challenges we faced was that although best practice was being followed and we were carrying out work to meet criteria over many years, the physical documented evidence was not available. As a result, the SDC programme has driven changes to our ways of working to ensure that if we do something, then it is defined, documented and available. This also meant that where processes or documentation was fragmented, it helped to streamline it into one area for greater understanding.”
✅ Tangible Improvements from joining the SDC Programme
Benefits that have been identified so far are:
- Driven standardisation of processes and procedures which mitigates duplication of work and provides consistent ways of working.
Strengthened relationships across departments/teams. - Regular communication and involvement of stakeholders has helped strengthen and align project goals with organisational objectives.
- Helped to drive cross-departmental change and initiate discussions for change at an organisational level.
- Has driven a greater focus on the Customer Experience to understand our customer needs and requirements.
- Identifying more efficient and effective ways of delivering our services in a more coherent manner.
- Independent validation of service quality.
- Competitive advantage - The SDI accreditation provides a competitive edge by showcasing MLCSU’s commitment to excellence and adherence to industry standards.
The CSU are committed to the SDI programme of work over the coming years, during which time many more benefits will take effect.
The Certification audit report has provided various recommendations to enable the CSU to continue to improve the maturity and foundations of the service. Key areas of focus that have been identified were specifically highlighted around Customer Experience, Knowledge Management, Training (Skills and competencies.) And tying them all together to achieve consistency in skills development for each role and End User Engagement (making it as robust as client engagement).
✅ Success in delivering service excellence
After receiving our Certification audit report, it was noted that seven out of the nine concept areas from when we initially benchmarked the service at the project’s inception were improved. With more than 60 individual criteria receiving higher scores than our initial assessment in 2023. This was an outstanding achievement alongside our 3 Star Customer Led Maturity rating on our first ever audit. This could not have been achieved without the support, hard work and dedication of the concept owners and stakeholder involvement in the concept working groups.
“I would recommend the Certification programme to other organisations. By formally assessing the capability of IT services against this standard, it allows any organisation to improve maturity levels and helps them to deliver excellent service and drive improvements.”
Our goal is to continue with the programme of work and drive continual improvement with an aim to achieve business led maturity by the end of 2026.
With special thanks to Robert Hussey, IT Service Improvement Lead and Evonne Hockaday, IT Service Delivery Manager, Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit.
