Looking beyond 2005 – how contact centres can play a key role in helping you to meet and exceed your Government e-service targets
Working towards Government e-service delivery
While it’s all too easy for observers to get an entirely misguided perspective of the state of our public sector technology, the reality is that one sector – local government – is making impressive progress towards achieving its upcoming Government e-service targets.
According to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), 90 per cent of local authorities are confident that they will meet the December 2005 deadline to open up service delivery in ways that are convenient and helpful to citizens. The bad news, for those councils still some way off hitting their citizen access goals, is that simply achieving the 2005 service targets probably isn’t going to be enough!
90 per cent of local authorities are confident
of meeting their December 2005 deadline to
open up service delivery for citizens
Following the recent Gershon review into Government service delivery, there’s clearly going to be an increased focus on the redeployment of resources to the front line. So – in addition to hitting 2005 service delivery targets – local authorities will now also have to refocus their services around specific customer needs.
Opening up local services to citizens is a key part of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s guidelines. There’s been a lot of emphasis on the ‘e’ part of e-Government, and for many this has led to the creation of a range of different websites to support the many varied aspects of public services delivered by the two million employees working in Wales and England’s 410 local authorities.
In this White Paper, we’re looking beyond the December 2005 service delivery deadline to focus on how contact centres can play a key role in helping local authorities achieve their objectives. The paper will identify some of the key trends shaping contact centre development in the public sector, provide local authorities with advice on setting up and managing access centres, and highlight some of the government drivers that are leading the move towards e-service delivery.
Addressing public service delivery complexity
It’s very easy for those not directly involved in the delivery of local services to overlook the complexity of public service delivery. As consumers, we’re all used to high profile transactional websites that allow us to do one thing well – buy books, book flights or bid on auction items. In the public sector, however, things are invariably more complex, and the same organisation that is charged with collecting local council taxes is also responsible for environmental services, lending books and reserving facilities at your local sports hall.
It’s still the traditional phone that remains the
channel of choice for 86 per cent of citizens
Not surprisingly, local authority website operators have held back from delivering on the vision of all-purpose transactional web sites. In reality, citizens tend to use their council web sites for practical reasons - to find out how late the library stays open or to see who to call about getting an old fridge taken away. Anything more complex and people still primarily turn to the phone. For most of us it’s still the traditional phone that remains the channel of choice, with research showing that 86 per cent of citizens still prefer to use it.
For local authorities, this typically involves the deployment of citizen access contact centres.
Addressing the key people and process issues
The councils who are already setting the service agenda are those that have looked at their entire e-Government programme as a comprehensive change initiative and have moved beyond an all-embracing local authority web site approach and started thinking about the people and processes that actually underpin council services. It’s not just about receiving a call or answering a citizen enquiry. The focus instead is shifting towards every aspect of how a service is delivered. Questions that need to be asked, before they can be answered, include who’s calling, why are they calling, what’s the root cause of their call, how can we best support the process of service delivery, how can we train our staff to better address these kinds of enquiries, and how can we measure how successful we’ve been.
Technology obviously has an important role to play here, whether it’s in providing a core CRM system to support citizen interactions, an IP infrastructure to support citizen contact centres, the quality monitoring and training needed to support contact centre performance optimisation, or the consultancy and integration skills needed to make it all work together. Not surprisingly, some council staff are worried about changes to service delivery and the impact on their jobs, it’s not just about implementing new systems and expecting the citizens to follow. Effective e-service delivery has to be focused on both people –the citizens that actually use them and those providing the services within the council – and on the service delivery processes that underpin them.
Effective Government e-service delivery
has to be focused on people and the service
delivery processes that underpin them
The good news is that the targets for e-service are achievable. Authorities such as Newport City Council – which recently won a prestigious National Customer Service Award – have done so by getting the basics right, focusing on the processes and taking their staff with them at every stage of the journey. They’ve set a clear strategy, worked with specialists to ensure the effective optimisation of their contact centres, and also taken advantage of industry best practices to move towards their desired outcomes.
Delivering ‘joined-up’ public sector services via contact centres
At the recent Society for IT Management (Socitm) conference in Edinburgh, Socitm’s President Chris Guest commented that too many local authorities were still too focused on delivering online services. He felt the agenda had moved on, and that councils should instead focus on making the 'e' in e-Government about effectiveness and efficiency. “If we do not make our new electronic services effective and get our customers to use them, we will not deliver the efficiency gains, which now appear to be expected from the Gershon Review and the government," he commented.
Guest went on to talk about the key criteria that e-service delivery needed to address. “Increasing take-up has to be high on all agendas, but it will only be delivered if citizens value and get real benefits from using e-service channels. They need to see greater convenience in
accessing services, better response times and real improvements in service quality. This means a renewed emphasis on delivering effective joined-up services based on citizens’ needs, rather than on organisational structures and boundaries.”
“Citizens need to see greater convenience in
accessing services, better response times
and real improvements in service quality”
- SOCITM President, Chris Guest
From a contact centre perspective, this invariably means getting the basics right from the start, and providing citizens with fast access to a centre staffed by well-trained agents with the support they need to provide callers with first time resolution to their enquiries. However, this sounds much easier than it is in practice. What’s becoming clear is that implementing a public sector contact centre is never going to be a quick technological fix for improving customer service and citizen access. Many councils have already found that contact centre projects can challenge their change management skills and resources, and also raise significant issues around how the authority actually understands its customers and operates its processes.
While there’s always been a wealth of private sector precedent to draw on, it’s again not that simple. Over the last decade, we’ve all seen private sector organisations successfully progress their use of technology within their contact centres to support new business challenges and enable wider access to their products and services. We’ve seen many of the benefits that this can bring, but we’ve also seen many of the mistakes that companies have made along the way.
Optimising public sector contact centre performance – key criteria for success
Now, as local authorities move towards implementing their own multimedia contact centres to broaden access to services, it’s worthwhile looking at what the public sector can learn from their private sector colleagues, and to make sure they don’t relive some of their mistakes. To help in this, we’ve put together a checklist of key criteria that we believe local authorities need to consider if they’re to successfully optimise their contact centre performance.
Major challenges facing today’s citizen access programmes
Our key checklist of criteria is focused particularly on what we believe are the ten major challenges facing today’s citizen access programmes. It also reflects an important shift towards developing and offering a higher quality of service through the contact centre.
Make sure you optimise your citizen contact resources – unlike the private sector, local authorities have to focus on broadening access to services and on ensuring services are available across a range of different channels – from walk-in branches, through e-mail and contact centres to self-service kiosks and speech-based voice applications. Optimisation, for example, could include keeping branch offices open to service citizens, whilst training branch staff to handle phone calls or e-mail enquiries when overall volumes increase, augmenting the contact centre by acting as virtual contact centre agents thanks to the latest IP-based contact centre solutions
Improving first call resolution – most calls to government departments cover simple issues, often not urgent, and are routine – however they’re all very important to the citizens who make them! However, because local authorities provide a very broad range of services with a great deal of complexity, first call resolution is a very different challenge in the public sector when compared to private sector goals. When it comes to addressing the effective resolution of complex council tax, housing or education issues, there’s a definite requirement for specialist advice and that typically requires higher levels of training and skills-based routing
Promote the use of alternative service channels – it’s all very well investing in self-service or web-based service channels, but citizens need to know they’re there, and they have to perceive a benefit from using them. A citizen might not initially be enthusiastic about self-service, for example, but if you communicate the benefits of the new access approach – such as 24x7 availability and the immediate access to information – then they’re more likely to be supportive. With the addition of electronic and voiceprint ID, lower cost channels can also be used to support more complex council services
One number strategy – worldwide there have been well-publicised stories of successful one number strategies – in New York City, for example, they’ve replaced some 1,850 separate lines with just two – 911 for emergencies and 311 for everything else. At a UK local authority level, councils need to decide whether to go for a single number (and then use tools such as call steering and IVR to channel calls automatically) or whether to use live agents to filter calls. Each of these will have resource implications
How important is self-service for local authority service delivery – for many local authorities, self-service typically refers to Information and Access Kiosks rather than self-service in the contact centre. For most councils, the majority of interactions are via the phone or visits to drop-in centres – it’s important to remember these volumes when developing an access strategy, and then decide on a self-service component only after talking to potential users and researching the real citizen requirements
Benchmarking performance against current best practices – it’s important for local authorities to start developing the metrics that will allow them to benchmark performance. Most councils are either going through or have completed the first round of local government contact centre implementations, and are starting to get some of the numbers they need for effective benchmarking. Local authorities now need to decide whether they benchmark their performance against their public sector counterparts or against some of today’s best-of-breed private sector operations who now make up the broader service environment
Addressing key capacity planning requirements – for many local authorities without fully-functional ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) systems in place it’s often difficult to gauge the true volume of calls being made to their different council departments. In the past, the actual volume of calls was often hidden by technology bottlenecks, and it’s only in the last 18 months that we’ve really started to understand the true levels of calls that citizens are making to local government.
A number of councils have found that their initial call volume projections have often been quickly exceeded, with some now handling up to 5,000 calls a day. Managing these sorts of numbers is very difficult without strong resource planning skills on board and a flexible Workforce Management solution in place. Without this, public sector organisations are in danger of repeating the mistakes private sector businesses made with capacity planning, when their call centres were initially staffed to meet retail-like opening assumptions. For most councils, busy times don’t always follow a pattern, with Environmental Health – for example – typically receiving most calls around 3pm, and General Enquiries coming in between 10am and 12 noon after people open their post.
Improving the overall citizen experience – increasingly, the citizen access centre is the public face of the local authority, and it’s essential that the agents in the access centre fully reflect and represent the council’s service culture. For 2005, a key focus for local authorities will be the calibre and consistency of how agents perform in the contact centre. The right training and development will play a key role in enabling and sustaining a better overall citizen experience
Improving agent performance and retention – key to the overall success of any e-service contact programme is the effectiveness and the productivity of the agents in the access centre. Integrated performance optimisation software can help here, reducing training and operational costs, and maximising overall contact centre and back-office performance. One way of improving overall agent performance is to hang on to the agents you’ve already got, reducing the need for ongoing agent replenishment, and cutting consequent recruitment and training costs. In addition to best recruiting and training practice, it’s important to value the agents you have, providing a positive career path, recognising fully-trained agents and appointing strong supervisors to ensure effective ongoing coaching
Investigating the root cause of calls - instead of just answering calls from citizens, a growing number of public sector organisations are now looking at just why people are calling into their access centres in the first place. We’re finding that many citizen calls are actually being driven by process errors caused by a council’s own back-office operations. Tracking the trends in the voice and data elements of these back-office processes can prove a valuable exercise and lead to significant time and cost savings
Benchmarking contact centres for public service success
The customer service sector has always been focused on driving productivity. With contact centres processing thousands of calls a day, simple quantitative measurements have been the primary metric that contact centre managers have always relied on to measure performance. In the private sector, however, an increasing percentage of customer service managers are recognising that some of their more basic measures - such as the volume of calls handled and the average length of calls for each centre – don’t tell the whole performance story.
Everyone seems to agree that a simple, quantitative focus on productivity won’t solve the underlying quality issues that contact centres need to address such as:
- How to ensure your contact centre is equipped with high calibre agents
- How to evolve your contact centre towards more qualitative and customer-focused measurements, and
- How to drive productivity within the contact centre, while still ensuring a high quality personal service
In the public sector, the challenge is more complex. Local authorities have to provide contact channels that meet all citizens’ needs – not just the channels that are the most cost-effective or widely used. Unlike the financial services sector, for example, councils are obligated to maintain local or branch offices – even though the cost per contact may be considerably higher than other available channels.
That’s why there’s a clear focus on ensuring that different public sector operations maximise the optimisation of their resources. This could involve access centre staff answering e-mails, or branch staff fielding calls or e-mails during quieter periods – effectively equipping and training staff to operate as virtual agents.
The reality then for local authorities is that – in addition to all the current services they’re expected to provide – they have to become expert contact centre operators. For many this has been a new challenge, and has required a significant investment in both infrastructure and resources.
Considering people, process and technologies
The public sector organisations that are doing this best are the ones that have fully considered all the people, process and technology aspects of running a successful contact centre – rather than simply transferring staff or buying the latest piece of software.
At Havebury Housing Partnership, for example, they’ve worked with specialist contact centre consultancy Sabio to overhaul their network and communications strategy. According to Havebury’s CEO, Steve Cook: “We’re using Avaya-based IP systems and applications to improve communications with our 6,000 tenants. We’re also optimising connectivity and costs for our internal voice and data networks. We’ve now got an infrastructure that gives us a platform for innovation going forward.”
While in Wales, Newport City Council has also worked with Sabio to help look at its own processes, and start to ask key service-related questions such as: are we logging calls correctly? Are we sending the right service requests to the right place? And does the service we’re providing actually match up with the council’s broader strategic objectives? Newport’s Contact Centre Manager Tony Curliss is using eQuality performance optimisation software from Witness Systems to help fine tune his access centre approach.
Optimising access centre investments
What these public sector organisations have in common is that they’re taking advantage of innovative processes and technologies to make the most of their access centre investment. Working with Sabio - and its key partners Avaya and Witness Systems - they’re setting a performance standard that stands comparison with best practice from any sector.
At Newport City Council they’ve gone one stage further, and their citizen access programme has recently been acknowledged in the prestigious National Customer Service Awards as the “Customer Service Contact Centre of the Year”, beating off competition from leading private sector contenders.
According to the Council’s Contact Centre Manager, Tony Curliss, it’s Newport’s commitment to an integrated Workforce Optimisation approach that has been the key driver behind its success. “It’s great to win national recognition, particularly as it sends a very strong signal that it’s possible for public sector organisations to set the standard when it comes to delivering exceptional customer service levels.
“At Newport City Council we’ve clearly
shown that it is possible for public
sector organisations to set the standard
when it comes to delivering exceptional
customer service levels.”
- Tony Curliss, Newport City Council
“When we first started our contact centre project we did an independent survey that showed that 86 per cent of Newport residents preferred to contact the council by telephone. Disturbingly, 45 per cent of those incoming calls were being abandoned. Since then we’ve worked closely with our specialist contact centre consultancy partner Sabio to build a workforce optimisation strategy that has really turned things around.
“The results speak for themselves. After replacing some 99 different council phone numbers with a single number for all enquiries, we’ve made the council much more accessible for citizens. We’re now handling some 11,000 calls a week – that’s 100 per cent up on a year ago, and we’re expecting further growth to some 14,000 calls a week in the next year.
“We’ve also succeeded in creating a contact centre environment that works for everyone involved – for our residents, for the agents themselves, and also for the council. We’ve seen our citizen satisfaction levels increase, we’ve got lower staff attrition levels, and our sickness and agent absence statistics are way below the national average,” continues Tony.
Gaining an understanding of what was possible
Newport City Council established its contact centre in May 2003, as part of the council’s broader initiative to meet the Government’s 2005 e-service delivery targets, providing citizens with single number access to all council-related enquiries. As consultants for Newport City Council’s major contact centre project, Sabio helped identify the two key driving factors - service provision and quality of service – that the council needed to address to ensure the success of its major Ł1.6 million contact centre project.
“Key to the success of our City Contact Centre project has been our close co-operation with Sabio, and our determination to approach the project in a structured manner. It’s too simplistic just to build a contact centre and expect all the pieces to fall into place, so we’ve worked closely with Sabio to first understand what was current best practice and what was achievable – and we then worked together to build a phased implementation,” he continued. “We first looked at putting a Workforce Management solution in place, and chose Open Wave from Sabio. Open Wave has helped us significantly with planning and ensuring agent satisfaction. We then progressed to quality monitoring, and again worked with Sabio to implement a Witness Systems eQuality performance optimisation solution. We’re now using eQuality to record every single call that comes into our contact centre – providing us with a valuable resource to ensure we’re delivering on our customer service commitments.”
Sabio has successfully delivered contact centre services and solutions to the public sector using technology from two of its key partners - Avaya and Witness Systems. Sabio’s experience in this sector, combined with its advanced consultancy capability and proven systems integration skills, gives public sector organisations access to best practice contact centre consultancy and technology services, and a fast track approach to public sector contact centre success.
