sponsored by Clement Clarke Communications
Presented to the Local Authority that can present the most innovative use of call centre technology in order to increase call handling levels and improve conditions for the workforce.

2011 Winner: South Staffordshire Council
The dilemma for South Staffordshire Council was how to improve the service by using technology whilst not increasing cost. The decision was made to develop an in-house customer queuing and handling system. Whilst the council does not employ any developers, existing internal, home grown skills were utilised. A technical assistant whose main responsibilities are hardware and systems support used his self developed skills to write a software system to support customer queuing and handling. The assistant went through the entire software development lifecycle. Not only did the system improve upon the previous software that was running but it also saved the council a considerable amount of money in licensing and maintenance costs.

Commended: Kent County Council
Like most local authorities, Kent is under pressure to deliver services at a significantly reduced cost. In order to introduce more services to the centre with little or no extra resource, Contact Kent investigated existing technology that could help. The CRM has been upgraded at no cost, with the knowledge base significantly improved, enabling some small services to have all the information available rather than searches on different systems, or days of training time. Email blending was also introduced through its telephone system. This ensures that an email is only dealt with when there are no phone calls waiting.

Commended: Leeds City Council
Leeds City Council is the UK’s second largest council and its contact centre receives over 135,000 calls per month. Engaging with Sabio to deploy Verint speech analytics across the council’s 240-seat contact centre will provide rapid access to all the valuable customer and performance information locked within thousands of recorded calls. This allows the team to surface and analyse trends that might otherwise have gone undetected – without having to manually listen to calls. In addition, Leeds City Council will use speech analytics as part of its broader workforce optimisation process to identify recordings quickly and support its contact centre agents with more focused and relevant training and development.

Commended: Newport City Council
Newport City Council recently made the move from a traditional location-centric CRM to a contemporary CRM employing a citizen-centric approach.After the new CRM system went live, the council conducted a benchmarking exercise which revealed that average call handling times had decreased considerably and the system now only involves 12 steps, rather than the old system’s 49, when agents have to change a citizen’s address. When a customer makes a telephone enquiry, the system logs the call as a service request regardless of whether the request requires any action or the caller simply needs information. This standardised procedure has simplified the way agents work, accelerating the entire process.