BPAS

The service prides itself on treating all clients with dignity and respect and provides confidential, non-judgmental services that span abortion, male and female sterilisation, vasectomy reversal, testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, as well as contraceptive advice and provision. BPAS has entrusted a large part of the organisation’s external training to Warwickshire College for the past ten years.

Appointment bookings are made through a Contact Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. Around 50 trained staff give information to callers and are responsible for booking face-to-face appointments for the charity’s nationwide network of clinics. Staff at the Contact Centre need to be highly skilled because they communicate with the general public, often at a time when they feel vulnerable.

Most of the Contact Centre staff have undertaken an NVQ, including Customer Service and Contact Centre NVQs at Levels 2 and 3. The organisation has a rolling process of appraisal and review and has linked the pay structure to employees’ length of service, work performance and NVQ qualifications.

The BPAS Training Manager said: “The NVQs are really working for us. We’ve found that it gives employees the big picture so that they can see how their role fits in and they can also clearly see the impact that their actions have on others further down the line. As a result, we have noticed there are far fewer errors and, of those that do arise, more are being resolved by the staff themselves, rather than being referred to a manager.

 
“The whole process causes them to question procedures and look for better ways of doing things. Since starting NVQs, we have experienced a large decrease of 10% in staff turnover which is important for us given the time, cost and effort that goes into staff recruitment and training.

“Warwickshire College gives BPAS an excellent service, from initially discussing our requirements through to implementing the training itself. Their NVQ assessors come in on a regular basis to see their learners and they are always reliable and very friendly. Downtime was an initial concern before we started, but it has all been so easy and we have been very pleased that it has had a surprisingly low impact on people actually doing their day-to-day jobs.”