Chichester boosts first-contact rates

Chichester District Council has boosted the percentage of customer queries resolved on first contact to over 80% while slashing the number of abandoned calls and boosting customer satisfaction.

The improvements follow a council-wide programme of customer service investment.

In housing services alone, the percentage of abandoned customer calls to the council has fallen from 15% to under 3%, with 91% of calls now answered within 20 seconds.

The initiative has also led to a 79% reduction in the number of telephone calls being dealt with by housing officers, enabling them to spend more time on important tasks such as improving customer accessibility, providing home visits for clients and driving improvement across service performance indicators.

Overall, 90% of housing service customers said they were satisfied with the service received in a customer satisfaction poll.

The customer service initiative kicked off in 2004 with a project team undertaking extensive business and process analysis within housing services and building control, planning enforcement and planning services.

Armed with this analysis, the council set up a pilot centre in 2005 to test the impact of contact centre-working on the organisation and its value to customers.

’The Customer Service Centre initiative has made a huge impact and really changed the ethos of the council towards service,’ said Jane Dodsworth, the council's assistant director ICT and customer service. ‘It's now top of the council agenda.’

Making use of Macfarlane CallPlus and Lagan Enterprise Case Management (ECM) technology, the contact centre initially received all telephone, face-to face, generic email and web enquiries at first point of contact.

The council routed customer calls direct to the contact centre, allowing all other calls to be dealt with through the switchboard. By providing customer service personnel with access to the council's existing Lagan ECM capabilities that are integrated into its back office systems, the council hoped to resolve more customer enquiries at first point of contact and improve service levels.

Within a short period of time, the centre's eight personnel were dealing with over 70 processes on behalf of the two service areas, in excess of 2,000 telephone calls per week, 150-200 personal visitors and approximately 40-50 email and web enquiries.

Following the success of bringing housing and planning and building control services into the customer service centre, Chichester has recently added a number of new services - concessionary fares, pest control, dog control, and land charge enquiries - and will be adding revenue and benefits and contract services in the near future.

This has boosted the number of contacts handled to around 9,000 a month.

Today, the customer service operation employs 13 personnel who are all multi-skilled to serve customers over the phone or face-to-face.

Based on its experiences and customer feedback, the council is also in the process of creating a dedicated customer service centre for handling face-to-face customer enquiries that is expected to open at the end of July 2009.



Chichester’s Integrated Telephony

In the initial contact centre pilot, the council used a rudimentary call capability within its Philips Sopho phone system.

However, over time, and as CRM fast became a corporate-wide system for Chichester, it recognised the need for telephony to be tightly integrated into both its CRM and web capabilities and for the need for more integrated phone and email handling capabilities.

In late 2008, the council researched the market for an enhanced telephony solution that could deliver the flexibility and scalability that it required. It also sought advanced multi-channel contact handling capabilities and the ability to integrate telephony to other in-house systems.

In January 2009, Chichester selected the CallPlus contact centre platform from Macfarlane Telesystems, a Lagan gold partner. The system was implemented and integrated to Chichester's existing CRM system and Philips phone system in April 2009.

The CallPlus platform delivers a range of contact centre capabilities for the council including intelligent call handling, queue management, agent screenphones (integrated to the Lagan ECM system), call recording, multimedia contact handling (for call, web and email contacts), sophisticated management information, interactive voice response and computer telephony integration (CTI).

Additional features such as an IVR-based customer survey application, a lone worker application and integrated SMS text, & web handling have been purchased and will be implemented shortly.