In today's mini-blog, we hear from Dave Panther and get a brief insight into a day in the life of the Video Remote Interpreting implementation team. Enjoy!
"A VRI man's work is always customer oriented. Sometimes it’s done remotely over the phone or via video conference calls. At other times, we can, or must, get out on the road and visit our customers – which we prefer! PAT tests, for example, the tests which ensure the safety of electrical equipment, must be done physically – for obvious reasons. However, whatever the initial purpose, we always make sure that we get the best out of every trip we make by including some customer training on Insight or by dealing with any other issues or queries our customers raise whilst we are on site. As you would expect, such trips take a bit of planning. The VRI team must work closely with our client contacts and the Account Manager to ensure the trip goes smoothly and we touch all the bases.
In addition to the PAT tests we do to cover the electrical safety of our installed equipment, we will check each iPad’s call history. We also discuss with the local users how they work with the systems and use the service overall, and try to provide any advice or guidance, especially for staff members who may have only recently started using the service. We depend to a certain extent on our primary contacts within each organisation to prepare the local users for our impending visits – this helps ensure that we can always make the most of our time and that the staff members get what they want from us.
The journeys can often be long, as we cover the whole country from our bases in London, Coventry, and Liverpool. However, long, or short, our support visits keep us in touch with our customers and have proved to be the best way to ensure that users are happy, patients are happy, and that we can promote Insight and LanguageLine to our far-flung user base. In fact, we’re never happier than when we’re out engaging with service users – it’s a real perk of the job!"