Find out how our Technology Services 2 agreement helped the Care Quality Commission (CQC) appoint a new IT partner, improving user satisfaction to almost 95%.

Published 27 July 2022

Last updated 27 July 2022

Background

The CQC is the independent regulator of health and social care for England. They wanted to prioritise their strategic plans to make it easier for:

  • providers to collaborate during inspections
  • the public to use CQC information
  • CQC’s own most critical resource – their mobile inspectors – to do their jobs 

Two thirds of CQC’s team do their job ‘on the road’ and cannot carry out the care and support required without effective mobile digital systems in place. In 2020, CQC focussed heavily on changing the IT service delivery model. The aim of this was to  make sure end users received not just good quality service, but consistent, proactive and excellent service that was delivered positively and empathetically.

The commission needed their IT partner to comprehensively understand their IT service requirements and respond quickly to its changing needs. Timescales were challenging and constantly moving. This meant CQC had to choose a provider that could rapidly establish the ongoing service delivery model using knowledge and experience gained from similar engagements, whilst supporting the transition and transformation to new technologies.  

Solution

With the support of the CCS category team, CQC chose the Technology Services 2 agreement. They awarded a 5 year contract to Littlefish to deliver and support the Digital Workplace programme through service transition and transformation into live service in June 2020 and onwards. As this took place at the height of the first COVID-19 national lockdown, delivery was executed remotely.

Littlefish’s approach was to act as an extension of the CQC IT team. They engaged regularly with CQC before, during, and after the service transition period to build an understanding of CQC’s working practices and business objectives, and to align their own behaviours in support of these. 

Littlefish also hosted ‘supplier days’ with CQC to transfer both business and IT knowledge and to give CQC a deep understanding of what Littlefish provides.  Mark Sutton, Chief Digital Officer at Care Quality Commission, commented:

“Littlefish demonstrated that they were really focused on the end users, and treat themselves as part of our team. They would empathise and they would care about what it was that people needed, making the transition to the new service really smooth. They delivered training to our team, so we had a deep understanding of what they do as an organisation, making them feel like an extension of our team.”

Challenges

CQC were keen to improve the quality of the IT service provision, particularly when it came to customer service, and it was important to Mark that CQC choose a provider that could focus heavily on excellent customer experience.  

Outcome

Prior to working with Littlefish, users were reluctant to call the CQC service desk. Since Littlefish took on the contract, they have helped CQC improve the first time fix rate to 85% and user satisfaction to almost 95%.

Selecting Littlefish as a service and transformation partner enabled CQC to radically redesign the digital experience of its employees through enhanced collaboration and productivity. It has enabled creative information sharing, both within CQC and across organisational boundaries with its partners, and has established a culture of continuously improving user-centric service delivery. 

CQC personnel now have a modern, mobile, connected working environment and a frictionless experience of using digital services that enables them to do a better job. Partnering with Littlefish allowed users at CQC to be more productive and less stressed, positively impacting their well-being. 

Mark added:

“I constantly get great feedback back from our colleagues about how empathetic and caring [Littlefish] are about getting people’s issues resolved.” 

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