Glasgow City Council handles more than 20million telephone calls each year. As the local authority for Scotland’s largest city, it has adopted a suitably imaginative solution to handling this myriad of calls. With specialist assistance from Siemens Communications, the council is in the process of establishing one of the first local government contact centres in the UK, which will not only improve “customer” service but will also save it money too.
This bold solution is part of an initiative called Access Glasgow, which aims to enhance public service delivery and to provide the citizens of Glasgow with the means to take advantage of the world of technology and e-commerce. Although it started before the recent e-government strategy launched by the UK national government, it very much mirrors and supports that programme – designed to ensure that all public services which can be made available electronically are made available as such by 2005.
Vital funding of £2m from the Modernising Government Fund, has been more than matched by additional investment from the council, running at an average of £2.5million per year.
The whole project, including the contact centre, has been designed to widen the public’s choice of access to services and provide them at a time that is more convenient. It focuses on four major areas – Health and inclusion, Regeneration, Access and Business change. Clearly, the contact centre is a key part of the Access element and this will be the first large project of Access Glasgow to be implemented.
Although contact or call centres are well established in the commercial sector, delivery of public services in this way is much rarer in the UK, which is why Glasgow turned to the private sector for expert assistance and selected Siemens Communications as its partner for the project. Indeed, the potential volume and diversity of transactions, which will be handled through the Glasgow call centre, is unprecedented.
The council avoids the use of the term “call centre” and prefers to describe it, more accurately, as an Access Centre - because it will embrace not just telephone voice contacts but also other forms of communication including fax, email and Internet.
The council believes that this Access Centre will eventually handle a large proportion of the 20 million enquiries it receives every year, which currently fall into over 100 general categories. Introducing the Access Centre should have a significant effect on the workload of many council employees.
From the customer’s point of view, it will provide help outside normal council office hours and at weekends and it has been designed to dramatically reduce the frustrating experience of being passed from person to person. One of the greatest attractions of the Access Centre is that it represents a single point of entry for end-to-end resolution of queries and problems. As Elma Murray, Depute Director of Financial Services, explained “Whether you want to report a street light that is out or an abandoned car that needs to be removed from the front of your house; whether you want to talk to social services about receiving home care services or apply for a disabled person’s parking badge, you contact the Access Centre and the first person you speak to should be able to resolve the issue. The system has been designed to reduce - to the absolute minimum - the need to pass callers from desk to desk but wherever a referral becomes necessary the history of the call travels with the caller - so avoiding the annoyance of having to explain everything all over again.”
The City Council is especially happy about the development because it expects to make savings up to 5%, thanks to Access Glasgow. These savings will come in a number of forms and include electronic payment mechanisms for Council Tax and council service delivery as well as a greater volume of transactions and enquiries undertaken via phone and other electronic channels rather than by conventional means. Council research indicates that on average each business transaction by phone costs just £2.05 compared with £7.17 for paper mail.
Further savings are expected to arise from the rationalisation and integration of systems, thus generating reduced administration costs, such as enhanced links between Benefits and Council Tax. Similarly, increased accuracy arising from the electronic completion of forms should minimise correction activity.
The project began in 1997 when the council undertook a review of a whole range of its services in response to a national government initiative called Best Value.
Elma Murray explained, “After detailed study, it was clear that the way in which we handled telephone calls was not the most efficient or effective way. We identified high levels of unanswered calls and queuing and people being passed from department to department and we recommended that the council look further at the possibility of a call centre.
“We also sought the assistance of a specialist consultancy to help us highlight the sort of things that we needed to look at thereafter, because no one in the council had particular experience of call centres. Although we had lots of small telephone units or enquiry desks for specific services, no one was actually experienced in the development or implementation of a large-scale, call centre which was what the council was considering.”
To support the major operational changes required, Glasgow City Council selected PPS Consulting, a contact centre consultancy practice to provide specialist help in a range of consultancy and training services. Describing the selection process, Elma Murray said “PPS Consulting came in with a very professional proposal and they understood exactly the type of help the council was going to need to get it to the next stage.
“They were really, far and away, the best bidder and were the clear choice of the evaluation panel, which was made up of representatives from six council departments. The wisdom of that choice has been entirely confirmed by events. In terms of all the completed work that PPS Consulting has done with us we have been really very happy.”
Developing solutions
PPS Consulting’s work began with a major piece of research which studied the number and type of enquiries currently received by the council. It analysed them and arranged them into three major categories – which it called commodity, comfort and complex enquiries. Martin Taylor, Business Consultancy Manager, explained: “Transactions that anyone could answer, no matter what their council background, we termed commodity enquiries. For example, what time does the library open? As long as you have the right access to the store of knowledge then you can answer that kind of question. The second area of transactions that we looked at was what we termed comfort transactions, which were still very simple but required an element of empathetic skill and a slightly different skill set to respond to. And the third category which called complex transactions and these involved further enquiries.”
This major piece of research was undertaken by the consultancy team over a period of about three months. It involved them in a huge amount of research, interviews, workshops, listening in to various departments and looking at data that already existed in various departments with regard to telephone calls, emails and how many people walk in through the door.
This research data was then used to model a typical working week for the proposed Access Centre and to determine how many advisers would be needed and what skills gaps needed to be bridged.
PPS Consulting consultants also supported the council in developing and implementing a communications plan to explain the Access Centre and how it would be developed and to win support and co-operation for it internally.
To achieve the aims of the Access Glasgow project has also involved tackling a complex range of technical issues. Kathryn Howe, Marketing Manager for Advanced Customer Solutions at Siemens Communications, said “A key issue on the technology side has been integration, because obviously the council has got dozens of back office systems and interfaces and you have to be careful about who you give full access to confidential items of information. It is really all about integration with their processes and that is what we have spent a lot of time scoping for them. We have had to work with them to design processes that are simple and easy for these operators to use. You can imagine the amount of work that we have had to do with them, to try and cover every single thing that people might be phoning up about.”
Research during the planning stage revealed that 60% of people who had recently contacted the council had done so by phone and that 56% of people would find it convenient to call after 5.00 pm. The majority of respondents indicated that weekend access would be especially convenient.
For many years the council has dealt with calls for emergency repairs on a 24 hour basis and has operated a standby facility for social work calls for the whole of the west of Scotland on a 24 hour basis as well. But the council’s plans for the Access Centre are to put in place telephone arrangements for a much wider range of services that tend not to be available outside 9am to 5pm at the moment. The plan is to make those services available over the telephone or on the web eventually from 8am to 8pm Monday to Saturday.
Demographic analysis of the research also highlighted some interesting facts. For example, it revealed that 25% of those interviewed have use of a computer at home and that of this group, 67% are aged between 25 and 44 years, are owner-occupiers, and are in work. In contrast, only 1% of council tenants have access to a computer at home.
“We recognised that the Access Centre was not just going to be about telephone calls - that it was going to have to be multi-media, offering internet access, fax access and email facilities.
“We also wanted to take some of the standards that we developed for the Access Centre and look at how we could provide those through our public offices as well, so that there is a consistency of standard of service right across the council.” Said Elma Murray.
Vital to the success of the project is a sound training scheme for existing and new council staff, particularly with regard to the new technologies and the necessary customer service skills - as well as the ways of the council and its services, of course.
A wide-ranging training program has therefore been conceived and put in place with the help of Siemens. Elma Murray said, “The training program will probably take most people about 12 weeks to complete. It will be fairly intensive in terms of the first phase and will involve training up to 90 staff for the Access Centre.”
In the first phase, which will commence in November 2002, the Access Centre will cover a range of services including council tax enquiries and billing, plus social work and general enquiries and a number of specific areas like blue badge applications as well as road and lighting faults and cleansing activities, including graffiti.
In excess of 100 different services will eventually be covered by the Access Centre. These include the home help catering service, other areas within financial services which deal with non-domestic rates, assessment and benefits, culture and leisure services (including libraries, leisure centres, cinemas and galleries), various building and planning functions like building control, environmental health and planning applications.
Phase Two is expected to go live by October 2003 and Phases Three and Four will follow approximately at nine-month intervals.
One of the additional benefits of Access Glasgow concerns the e-government strategy laid out by Central Government for both national and local departments. Although Access Glasgow was initiated before the e-government targets were set nationally - and not as a result of it - nonetheless it will go a long way to ensuring that Glasgow meets and beats those targets.
Access Glasgow will be a significant factor, not only in enhancing public service delivery, but also in providing the means for the citizens of Glasgow to take advantage of the world of technology and e-commerce. Working as partners, both the City Council and Siemens believe that the Access Centre will open the door to a new and life-enhancing experience for the people of Glasgow – with technology providing fast and convenient access, and at a lower cost.
Through its Advanced Customer Solutions (ACS) Siemens offers one of the most comprehensive portfolios of Contact Centre, CRM and Mobile Business services available in the UK. ACS solutions comprise state-of-the-art and award-winning technologies in combination with a comprehensive suite of professional services. Solutions are tailored to meet the needs of both public and private sector organisations and are delivered in conjunction with technical design, implementation, training and lifelong support.