Leeds City Council has rolled nine call centres into one
by building a £1.8m contact centre to house 250 agents and 70
back-office staff. The centre will be capable of handling more than
30,000 calls a week.
The council will use the centre to support its electronic
service delivery targets and improve citizen access to key
services, including housing, social services, environmental
services, council tax and benefits.
Contact centre services company Sabio designed and implemented
the multimedia IP-based centre, which uses a telephony system from
Avaya. Sabio will support all the centre's systems and applications
for five years under a managed services contract.
The centre uses Avaya Interaction Center running on the Avaya
Communication Manager multimedia contact centre and IP telephony
platform. It also uses Witness Systems Impact 360 for Communication
Manager - a workforce optimisation system.
Innovations featured at the centre include Plantronics IP
headsets, run by Power over Ethernet technology, and flat screens,
which both reduce the contact centre's power consumption.
Supervisors use wireless Bluetooth headsets to manage the agents
away from their desks. The council is also considering using video
over IP to communicate with deaf citizens via sign language.
"The aim of the programme is to eventually deal with [and
resolve] 95% of calls [at the first point of contact] either
through one centre, or 17 one-stop shops," said Paul Goode, contact
centre project manager for Leeds City Council.
The new contact centre will integrate into the council's
existing Cisco Lan and Wan, and Siebel customer relationship
management and Blue Pumpkin call-routing applications, and will
enable the council to use voice over IP across its corporate
network, vastly reducing call costs.
Goode said the project was a success, but had held a number of
concerns for him as project manager. "I was anxious about whether
the technology would work, whether the new building was suitable,
whether the people would move, whether it would be done on time,"
he said.
"In terms of people, process and technology, the risks involved
were massive. There were a lot of human resources issues involved
in the staff relocations."
The centre is now operational, but will have an official launch
in the first week of March.