IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

West Somerset chief executive Tim Howes is preparing his best telephone answering voice for a stint in the council's call centre to mark National Customer Service Week.

Howes will be one of several senior officials answering calls from the public as part of an effort to raise awareness about the work of the customer service team in the week beginning 3 October 2005.

When the Council agreed upon its new service strategy in September 2004, it identified that a Contact Centre would be essential to improving service and driving up first time resolution rates. Seven months in planning, the Centre was opened on 4th April 2005 and today handles customer calls relating to Environmental Services (including pest control, bulky refuse and taxi license calls) as well as Revenue & Benefits services.

The new Contact Centre was set up in 2006 at the main Council offices, replacing an earlier centre that handled mainly waste and housing repairs calls. Since opening, the centre has been expanded to take on several front-line services, as well as handling all switchboard enquiries. And at the same time as the contact centre was being set up, Daventry District Council created a One Stop Shop for the delivery of face-to-face customer service - with the new facility powered by a Lagan Enterprise Case Management (ECM) solution.

The new contact centre in Darley Dale, Derbyshire, went live on 2nd December 2004, and currently handles around 63,000 calls a month. The centre employs 41 people, with numbers expected to grow to around 70 people within the next two years.

Whitehall is in the dark over the performance of its call centres, with poor monitoring threatening to undermine the quality of service offered, a report by Parliament's Public Accounts Committee has found

London Borough of Lewisham will initially use BT QueueBuster to manage enquiries relating to revenues and benefits, environmental issues and housing repairs. The borough's contact centre has 100 seats and processes approximately 1.5 million calls every year.

When the Council agreed upon its new service strategy in September 2004, it identified that a Contact Centre would be essential to improving service and driving up first time resolution rates.

It's going to be used by citizens to name and shame public sector call centres who fail to do a good job. It's a natural result of citizen dissatisfaction over poor call centre results, and is to be applauded. There are too many poor or appalling call centre operations, and this will put them under the spotlight.

The 'Customer Service Excellence' initiative will lead to a significant expansion in the Council's customer services operation and, in the first stage of this expansion, completed in August 2009, Council Tax enquiries (the second largest call volume area for the Council), along with Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefits, have been moved into the Council's centralised customer service centre. The customer service centre was already handling Environmental Services (waste, recycling, planning, trees, street cleansing etc.) and general Council enquiries. The expansion sees the service centre grow to 30 Full Time Equivalent personnel, a 24 percent increase.

Any local authority or central government department with a call centre or call handling operation (and we imagine that's almost all of our readers), should read this, as it gives a good insight into public perceptions of call centres - the backbone for many an e-government set-up.

The Cabinet Office has ignored a recommendation from MPs that a cross government public services helpline modeled on NHS Direct should be tested.

MPs on the Public Administration Select Committee had recommended that the government should set up a telephone service similar to the French 'Allo Service Public', which answers 70% of enquiries in one call without having to refer people elsewhere.

For Virginia, the most threatening weather incident this summer did not come as you might expect from a hurricane, but from what’s called a “derecho”: a widespread, long-lived windstorm with rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms.

Without official warning on June 29, a derecho swept across a large swath of the state. At the storm’s height, nearly 2.5 million residents were without power for as long as two weeks — the largest non-hurricane power outage in the state’s history. The situation was made worse by a long heat wave baking the region.

NASA has put its Shared Services Center website into a secure government cloud to reduce call center inquiries and improve operational efficiencies.

NSSC is running live within RightNow Technologies’ Secure Government Cloud, which meets Federal Information Security Management Act and National Institute of Standards and Technology moderate security compliance levels, according to RightNow officials.

Dyersburg’s call center fields customer calls in an integrated 311 and 911 environment, where both emergency and non-emergency calls are answered by the same operators. Different ring tones let operators quickly sort emergency calls from less urgent requests.

Traditional employee training often involves sitting in a classroom and taking quizzes on the course material after an instructor provides a lesson. To avoid pulling employees into a classroom during work hours, training administrators at the Snohomish County, Wash., 911 call center (SNOPAC 911) enlisted the assistance of a Web-based training system.

SNOPAC is a regional, consolidated emergency communications center that provides 911 and dispatching services to 39 public safety agencies in Snohomish County where 630,000 incidents are handled every year. It’s one of the largest 911 centers in Washington state and covers nearly 80 percent of Snohomish’s geography, said Kurt Mills, SNOPAC’s executive director.

There has been tremendous growth recently in the number of government agencies that rely upon dedicated call centers to provide citizens with a single point of contact--accessible through the Web, phone or by email--for non-emergency issues. In the United Kingdom, for example, the central government issued a mandate that by this year, all municipalities must deploy centralized eGovernment call centers to deliver better service to citizens by simplifying their interactions with municipal agencies.