Customer Stories: Care Quality Commission

Littlefish and the CQC

Littlefish have worked with CQC since 2015 and were appointed as their managed service provider mid-2020 to deliver IT service desk, service management office, modern workplace, and infrastructure management to over 3,500 users. 

At the time, The Care Quality Commission wanted to prioritise its strategic plans to make it easier for providers to collaborate during inspections, easier for the public to use CQC information, and easier for CQC’s own most critical resource – its mobile inspectors – to do their jobs. Bearing in mind, two thirds of CQC’s team do their job ‘on the road’, so to speak, and cannot carry out the care and support required without effective mobile digital systems in place.  

In 2020, the CQC’s plan focussed heavily on changing the IT service delivery model to ensure end users received not just good quality service, but consistent, proactive and excellent service that was delivered positively and empathetically. 

CQC expected their IT partner would be able to comprehensively understand their IT service requirements and respond quickly to its changing needs. Timescales were challenging and constantly moving and thus, the 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.   

Littlefish was required to deliver and support the digital workplace programme through a 6-month service transition and transformation into live service in June 2020 (the height of the first covid-induced national lockdown, so all this was executed remotely) and onwards to the service as it stands today.  

The Littlefish approach

Littlefish also hosted ‘supplier days’ with CQC to transfer both business and IT knowledge and to give CQC a deep understanding of what Littlefish provide. These meetings also allowed CQC and Littlefish to maintain a strong relationship, ensuring cross-supplier service improvement initiatives were on track, and to generally discuss BAU service delivery and the appropriateness of current integration models. 

To this day, the relationship between CQC and Littlefish is excellent – and the organisations continue to work in a very transparent, open, and honest fashion.  

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.

Mark Sutton, CDO, The Care Quality Commission 

CQC had suffered significant issues with their previous IT service providers, particularly when it came to customer service, and it was important to Mark Sutton (CDO at CQC) to choose a provider that could focus heavily on excellent customer experience.   

Littlefish service desk is unique in the market, focussed around the needs of the user, and the quality and the empathy provided to them all of the time is of the highest order. [The CQC] know we care about how successful they are as an organisation, continuously improving the service to better those levels of service excellence by providing 24/7 rapid responses, ensuring their issues are fixed and that they’re resolved in a timely manner.

Mark Petty, Sales & Marketing Director, Littlefish.

Enabling digital transformation 

Selecting Littlefish as a service and transformation partner enabled CQC to radically redesign the digital experience of its employees via 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 wellbeing.  

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

Mark Sutton, CDO, The Care Quality Commission