A new contact centre has meant fewer abandoned service
calls and a better service for Lancaster City Council and its
citizens.
The council established its contact centre after research among
1,000 local residents revealed that more than 80% would prefer to
contact the council by telephone and wanted to have their queries
dealt with at the first point of contact.
The contact centre went live in September after a three-month
pilot. It is based on Macfarlane Telesystems' open architecture
servers, which run Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Callplus,
which is Macfarlane's telephony system.
Callplus includes an automatic call distribution facility, call
recording software, management information software, and
interactive voice response software. The contact centre also uses
Intel Dialogic computer telephony hardware.
The system uses Lagan Frontline for its customer relationship
management software, which was integrated into Callplus in less
than a day, according to Lancaster City Council.
In September, Lancaster City Concil evaluated the pilot, and the
council's cabinet decided to extend the contact centre to allow
citizens to call the customer service centre about a wider range of
council services in the future.
Lancaster's customer service centre currently employs five
full-time staff and handles up to 300 calls a day, on matters such
as domestic bins, fly tipping, street cleanliness, abandoned
vehicles and litter.
Jane Allder, head of information systems at Lancaster City
Council, said the contact centre had raised service levels for
local citizens.