IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

Its success continues to grow with well over a quarter of a million of visits to the site each month.

’Ask Brad’ lives on www.relocationbradford.com - run in conjunction with the Chamber of Commerce, Jobcentre Plus and Bradford Centre Regeneration.

It is a clear indication that Bradford is keen to entice investment from major employers and to attract new residents to the District.

Caron Bentley of the Council's Business Improvement Team highlights how the planning contact centre is driving through wider changes in service delivery across the local authority.

South Gloucestershire Council recently received a special commendation from the judges of the Innovation of the Year Award, sponsored by the Professional Planning Forum, an independent industry body who support effective resourcing and planning in the contact centre industry. The award process is open to both Private and Public sector organisations and this year saw a record of five Councils reaching the finalist stage.

A new customer contact centre, set up in June 2004, and based on Macfarlane Telesystems’s CallPlus technology has been key to this success. Ratings are based on customer satisfaction research undertaken each month by South Lakeland Council. A random selection of citizens that made contact with the Council during the previous month are called and asked how satisfied they were with the way their queries were handled.

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.

Citizens Advice Bureauxs (CABs) already have very high public recognition and trust and are known to be completely independent. They have always acted as intermediaries – having face-to-face meetings with people, writing letters and making phone calls on their behalf. eGovernment gives us as a CAB a new channel to use in helping our clients solve their problems.

The e-enabled Customer Service Centre comprising a centralised one-stop Shop and Call Centre have already achieved significant benefits, proving Luton Borough Council is an organisation that can meet and exceed customer service requirements, embrace the e-Government agenda and implement projects that make a good Council excellent.

Today, the South Lakeland contact centre, located in Kendal, handles approx 9000 incoming citizen enquiries a month relating to fourteen key environmental services including recycling, road scene, refuse collection and bulk collections. Five customer service advisors work in the centre today although there are plans to double this number as new services are introduced in coming months.

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.

Carried out on behalf of Teasel Performance Management, the report reveals that of those that do measure customer satisfaction, in-house contact centres were much more proactive on overall assessment, with 83% sending out questionnaires; 43% calling customers at random; 43% calculating average call value; and 26% asking customers to stay on the line to complete a brief survey. The most common approach to measuring customer satisfaction (100%) was to listen to a selection of calls and make a judgement

The new Centre is designed to improve access to Council services as well as to meet Government guidelines for the introduction of Electronic Government by 2005. Sefton MBC is headquartered in Bootle on Merseyside and serves a population of 290,000 citizens.

Almost 70 per cent of all calls received from the public are able to record details in the system and route them directly to the right member of staff for action.

The Comino system keeps citizen information from a wide range of sources in a central database. This links with Spelthorne’s online payment and facilities booking applications, providing a fully integrated, customer-focused approach. In the first full year of use, Customer Services handled almost three times as many calls, with the same number of staff and with improved response rates. Spelthorne’s community transport service, ‘Spelride’, has reduced the average number of engaged calls from over 2,000 a month to just seven, thanks to improved call routing and changed processes enabled by Comino.