Newport City Council has used Oracle-based CRM software to radically improve the service of its contact centre, resulting in higher call volumes with less staff.
"We've been able to keep the centre at the equivalent of 27 full-time staff this way instead of the 34 we think we'd have had to otherwise," its principal consultant in its Information Systems and Communications service, Phil Cox, told PublicTechnology.net.
"This has also let us improve processes within the whole contact centre service," he added.
Cox and his team worked with supplier Fujitsu to deploy Oracle TeleService Release 12, which integrates all the council's CRM applications by fully automating the entire request process. This replaced an older Oracle CRM system which he characterises as, "Under powered, obsolete and lacking the functionality the contact centre required to perform its duties effectively. We needed a modern, fully-supported application to act as our CRM platform."
Now, all contacts - telephone, email or the web - are automatically routed to agents who have instant access to a comprehensive knowledge database of services, he added.
As a result, average call-handling times have decreased, the number of service request types has been slimmed from 140 to 80 so as to shorten the call-handling process, and by lowering the number of steps in the address-change process from 49 to 12 has greatly simplified the whole citizen contact procedure, further accelerating service delivery.
"We now plan to use the additional functionality here when we open a new face-to-face multi-agency contact centre in spring 2011," he added.
Newport is the eighth largest unitary authority in Wales, responsible for administrating all areas of local government within the region and has a yearly budget of £228m. Its 7,000 employees provide education, highways, strategic housing, leisure, planning and social services to a population of approximately 137,000 residents.
Source: http://www.publictechnology.net/sector/local-gov/newport-city-council-improves-call-centre-response-oracle-crm
