Agenda item

(Director of Resources) to consider the attached report.

The Assistant Director of ICT and Facilities Management, Mr Newton introduced the latest telephone monitoring statistics covering the period April 2016 to August 2016. The meeting noted that the use of voicemail increased in August, probably due to holidays.  The figures were going in the right direction for this period with far fewer calls being received this year than last year, probably due to the problems experienced with the waste management contract last year. Also the number of abandoned calls had decreased and calls going to voicemail had increased over this period.

Councillor Bedford asked if calls were transferred back to the switchboard after 10 rings or so. Mr Newton said it depended on how the system for that section had been set up. The council default was that it would go back to the switchboard, but it may also go into a workgroup for another team member to pick up.

Councillor Jennings asked if a lot of the telephone requests/queries could be moved on to our website. Mr Newton said that the website had not been set up as yet but they were adopting ‘intelligent forms’. The Website Development Board was currently looking into this. When the new Customer Services Manager started in November, they would be looking for changes to be set up.

Councillor Mohindra asked if a lot of calls went straight to the switchboard. He was told that there was not a lot of information on this but more data could be had. Councillor Mohindra noticed that there were a lot of abandoned calls to the switchboard. Mr Newton said that they were having some problems keeping people in those posts.

Councillor Lion noted that the PR section were currently looking at ‘channel shift’ and were looking at how to do more things online, although we would still maintain telephone and personal contact points. The new Customer Contact Centre would change the way that we operated.

Councillor Bedford said that he had a query on bins recently and had phoned the council. He spoke to a very helpful officer who sorted his problems there and then. Not everyone would want to do things via the internet and officers should always be available by phone. He then asked what sort of expertise would the officers in the new contact centre have? Councillor Lion said that they would be generalist, able to cover about 80% of the calls with only about 20% being referred to specialist officers.

Councillor Shiell said that the switchboard service had greatly improved over the last three to four years and wondered what sort of system they had; was it a paper or computer database. Mr Newton said that they had a computer based system, as well as their personal knowledge built up over time. Councillor Shiell wondered if their collective knowledge could be somehow put into a database so we did not lose their expertise.

Councillor C Roberts commented on the increased number of voicemail calls and asked if we monitored the number of voicemails that were followed up. He was told that this could not be monitored by the phone system and could really only be monitored by the policy we had in place. We have not received any complaints about this for some time. Councillor Mohindra asked if they could check how often voicemail was checked. Mr Newton said he would look into this as he was not sure if this could be done.

Councillor Patel suggested that the Committee ask the new Customer Services Manager to come and give a presentation. Councillor Lion said that she should be given some time to settle into her job, and perhaps ask her to come to the March 2017 meeting. We could also ask an officer to attend the December 2016 meeting and speak to us about the ‘Channel Shift’ project. This was agreed by the Committee.

RESOLVED:

(1)  That the telephone monitoring statistics for the period covering April 2016 to August 2016 be noted;

(2)  That an officer be invited to the December 2016 meeting to give a short presentation on the ‘Chanel Shift’ project; and

(3)  That the new Customer Services Manager be invited to give a short presentation to this Committee in March 2017.