Wokingham Borough Council turn to NewVoiceMedia for telephony support

With Wokingham having one of the highest computer literacy rates in the UK, the Council had to consider the innovative ways that they could communicate with their customers.

Overview

Situated in the Royal County of Berkshire the Wokingham Borough is made up of 17 parishes and towns, each with their own distinctive character. It offers a unique blend of countryside and town, historic features and up-to-date facilities, big business and market town trading.

The economic prosperity of the Borough, together with a pleasant environment and excellent transport links has made the area a popular place to live and work.  Current projections indicate that the population of the Borough continues to increase and by 2014 it expects to have a population of around 159,000 which may increase further to some 167,400 by 2029.

With the growth of the community comes increased pressure on Wokingham Borough Council’s customer service departments to respond effectively to their demands.  Wokingham has one of the highest computer literacy rates in the UK, challenging the Council to provide more innovative ways that its customers can communicate with the Council. Furthermore, recommendations from the recent Varney Review pushed the E-Government agenda and identified major opportunities to make local authorities more accessible, convenient and efficient to meet citizen and business expectations.

Challenge

Wokingham Council recognised the need to change the nature of their customer interactions with a new contact centre solution.  A review of their existing customer service offering identified the following areas of concern:

• Inconsistent call handling across the Council.
• Necessity for customers to make multiple calls to different departments for routine enquiries.
• Absence of a central system for recording customer contact.
• Duplication of efforts across teams leading to inefficient use of resources.
• A variety of business systems that couldn’t speak to each other.
• No metrics on the performance of customer service team members.

The Council needed to ensure that the solution it chose to address the challenges was the most appropriate. At this point the Council turned to Sarah Barrow, customer service manager at Wokingham Borough Council, and tasked her with managing the transformation. Her first task was to liaise with other local authorities to get a picture of what made good practice, as well as visit call centres managed by private companies.

“We looked at a variety of contact centre solutions and asked many questions internally. Should we invest in and run our own hardware? Could our current servers handle a new system? Was turning to the cloud an option? What type of payment models exist?” explains Barrow.

The organisation embarked on a thorough seven-month evaluation process before selecting NewVoiceMedia to support their customer service requirements.  “NewVoiceMedia’s solution is cloud-based, easy to use, effective and represented a relatively small investment when compared to hardware-based contact centre services,” stated Barrow. “It represented a new technology and way of working that was more progressive than the other solutions we reviewed. It was important that the new system not only answered our current challenges but was also flexible to grow with us as we evolved.”

The process of choosing a new telephony solution for the contact centre had been a lengthy one, and the move to a new cloud based-service meant there was additional pressure from within the council to ensure the investment worked and was delivered on time.

The solution

Unlike a traditional contact centre where the hardware can cost a small fortune and can take a considerable amount of time to get up and running, NewVoiceMedia’s contact centre solution uses a remote (virtual) telephony system to provide the links and call plan intelligence between the customers and the Council’s customer service agents (CSAs).

With no additional capital expenditure the Council was able to only pay for what it used ‘on-demand’.  There are no hidden costs for maintenance as NewVoiceMedia takes full responsibility for the infrastructure.

“The ability to only pay for what we used was very attractive and, because we didn’t need to spend hundreds of thousands on installing hardware, the cloud-based NewVoiceMedia solution is staggeringly cost-effective,” explained Barrow.

The implementation

In January 2009, Wokingham Borough Council launched Wokingham Direct, its new customer service solution built using NewVoiceMedia’s hosted contact centre technology. The doors opened with a team of seven manning the phones hoping for a quiet week to allow everyone to get to grips with the new processes, technology and cultural change of using a hosted solution.

However, no one told Mother Nature and instead of teasing the solution into action by fielding waste, recycling and general switchboard enquiries, the UK was hit with the worst snow storm the country had seen for decades. The region was struck with snow, floods and school closures on an unprecedented scale which resulted in huge surge of calls to the Council.

“That first week was a major test of the technology,” Barrow explained. “The implementation process had gone smoothly and we were looking forward to gently testing the new technology. Instead were thrown into the deep end. I was apprehensive that the system would crash under the weight of the calls and the project would understandably be viewed as a disaster by the rest of the Council.”

The system not only survived the first week but robustly demonstrated its value to the local community and was hailed a success by the team using the new technology and most importantly by the customers calling Wokingham Direct.

The benefits

“NewVoiceMedia’s solution has revolutionised how we deal with the general public,” states Barrow. “The customer service team now manage 16,000 calls per month, an increase of around 50 per cent, and the team has grown from seven to 17 multi-skilled CSAs who can deal directly with any of the 200 different services that Wokingham Borough Council provides. The difference is that the CSAs can now resolve a much higher percentage of the calls at first point of contact, rather than having to forward the customer to specific departments.”

Targets have been set internally to answer 80 per cent of calls in 20 seconds and CSAs now also interact with customers through emails, webchat, admin work and face-to-face contact. The NewVoiceMedia system provides robust statistics on call performance so Barrow is able to understand the call handling process better and match resources to customer demands quickly and efficiently.  With a click of a button the solution allows her to review the call length, subject and queue times for her team.

Moving forward

“Since the launch we have not rested on our laurels but have continued with the help of NewVoiceMedia to evolve our telephony system. We have linked the solution with QBuster functionality to manage peak call volumes and use messaging on the call plan to advise customers of new promotions or surveys they can participate in,” states Barrows.

The service allows members of the public to leave their name and number during peak call times, such as Monday morning, with the guarantee that they will get a call back within 15 minutes. Customers appreciate not being left in a queue for long periods of time.

“QBuster has proved to be a very popular service with the local community. We have also learnt from our first week and now have the ability to make disaster recovery announcements which can be remotely activated,” continues Barrow

The implementation was considered a success on every level and was recognised at the Top 50 Call Centre Awards 2009. Wokingham Borough Council secured 6th place in the public sector category and came 29th across both public and private sectors in the UK Top 50 Call Centres for Customer Service where they were up against some massive global brands.

One year on

There is still a lot of work to do and Barrow and her team are constantly striving to improve the service offered to customers.

“We are looking at a number of new services such as speech analytics so we can better understand our customers and why they are calling us. Messaging in the queues will also help direct customers to different channels such as web chat, kiosks or the internet,” said Barrow.

Other services being considered include Mini IVR (interactive voice response systems) which allows customers to leave a queue to hear pre-recorded messages. For example, if the Council is promoting free swimming for under 16s at its leisure centres the call centre has traditionally received an increase in calls. By using Mini IVR Wokingham Borough Council can record a message stating all the times, locations and other details that the general public may be interested in and in turn free up the CSAs to answer other enquiries.

“We were very proud that our efforts have been recognised so quickly after implementation and that our customers are enjoying a high quality of customer experience,” states Barrow. “If the solution achieved this much in such a short period of time, we are truly excited about what the future holds as we start exploiting the additional functionality of NewVoiceMedia’s technology. We are so impressed with the ability of the solution that we firmly believe Wokingham Borough Council can gate crash the top ten at the Call Centre Awards next year,” concludes Barrow.

Pictured above: the team at Wokingham Direct.