Background

The Neighbourhood Contact Centre (NCC) currently has a process that manages and reports on calls but it is manual, time-consuming and somewhat laborious due to the nature of the tools involved. Agents record call information on personal spreadsheets and there is no central system that collates information to provide a record of individual callers. This limits customer service as agents do not have access to the history of the situation and frustrates callers who have to repeat themselves each time they ring. 

The NCC operates as both a switchboard and a first resolver - the latter for rent queries predominantly. The  switchboard function relies on agents having access to an update-to-date patch list that identifies the team or staff member to whom the agent needs to transfer the call. Recently, this was greatly improved by the replacement of a PDF with a shared, online Google Doc. The journey is complicated further by the fact that, if the phone is not picked up, the agent has to carry out a manual process of emailing the relevant party and requesting that they call back the caller. 

Rent enquiries can largely be resolved as agents have access to the necessary information on Universal Housing. However, many of these enquiries can be resolved by the caller themselves (either online or via the automated call number) and encouraging channel shift should be a component of this project. By looking at the entire journey from motivation-of-call through to resolution, we hope to identify opportunities to promote self-service.

Statistical reports on call data are collated from the agents’ spreadsheets. This is highly manual, time-consuming and potentially error-prone due its manual nature. The employment of a database and insight software will make this task more efficient and widen the variety of reports available, leaving more time for the interpretation of the data.

Service Assessment

We used this website as the repository of information for our Local Government Digital Service Standard Assessment.