Cardiff Council
Using Customer Interaction Management Technology to Provide Easy Access to Services
BACKGROUND INDUSTRY With more than 50,000 resident inquiries handled each Local Government month using a sophisticated telephony and multi-channel call management system, it’s hard to imagine that the GOALS Cardiff Council’s progressive contact centre didn’t exist four To have an easy-to-use system that years ago. required minimal staff training. Multi- lingual capabilities. One phone number for “Ours was a green field site,” recalls Isabelle Bignall, head access to 130 services of contact centre services at Cardiff Council, the local government authority serving a population of 320,000 in a SOLUTIONS southwestern region of the United Kingdom. Contact Center: Enterprise (Formerly According to Bignall, “Before we set up the call centre, none CIM) existed. Citizens seeking a service like refuse collection would open phone directories and see 400 different Mitel Network Telephony numbers listed for Cardiff Council. Our main switchboard was jammed continuously. When a caller succeeded in BENEFITS getting through, they suffered long delays, were put through • Instantly generate call histories for to the wrong department and in some cases were forced to repeat their story time and again. There was no contact agents centre, no trained agents, and just Council employees • Lower overall contact centre costs answering phones with little to no training.” • Better utilization of staff and resources • Comprehensive view of the services citizens are requesting
“Contact Center: Enterprise is part of our contact centre, as it enables us to manage, track and measure our interactions with a multi-lingual population of more than 300,000 citizens. The flexible framework allows me to exercise complete control over our contact centre operations.”
Isabelle Bignall, Head of Contact Centre Services
CONNECT TO CARDIFF
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Today, a telephony solution based on Contact meals and weather-related school closings. Centre: Enterprise, formerly Syntellect’s (CIM) The same study also revealed the citizenry solution, which is resold as Mitel Commander desired something else: a choice of by partner Mitel Networks and runs on the communications channels to gain help or achieve company’s voice messaging system, the Mitel a satisfactory answer to their questions about 3300ICP, helps to satisfy the needs of citizens Cardiff Council services. In addition to telephone- counting on the Council for government services. based support, respondents wanted the ability Bignall says the completion of a perception study to interact with the Council using e-mail, text of how and why citizens communicated with messaging and Web chat. the Council changed earlier approaches, which Bignall says emerging from the study results consisted of a combination of phone and in- was a new vision for the services Cardiff Council person support. provided to local residents, one that would “The study examined the methods our citizens support “an integrated strategy for information- used to contact the Council. It also compiled their age government, where the people of our City suggestions regarding how we could improve could choose how they wished to contact the communications in general.” Council rather than the other way around.” Ultimately, the study demonstrated that 83 At the new contact centre, realising this percent of citizens wanted to contact the Council vision meant expanding the Council’s by telephone to access nearly 130 specific technology capabilities to provide a variety of services ranging from refuse collection and bill communications options for citizens to get their payments to information about free school questions resolved upon first contact.
SOLUTION
Cardiff Council took several months to conduct By linking all these communication channels a pilot program designed to produce a desirable together through EI’s Contact Center: Enterprise, citizen relationship management (CRM) system. we now have a comprehensive view of the Then, after considering several different options services our citizens are requesting, as well as for call routing and customer interaction the channels they are using to access those management, including various ACD and services.” switchboard systems, Bignall says Cardiff began Previously, there were 400 separate phone looking more closely at a combined offering from numbers listed for the Council. The jargon Mitel and Enghouse Interactive, with the latter used in phone directories was meaningful to supporting full integration with the Council’s employees but had no meaning to callers. With CRM system. the combination of Contact Center: Enterprise The joint solution involving Mitel and Enghouse (CCE) and Mitel, the new system’s routing Interactive’s Contact Center: Enterprise delivered capability now requires only one main phone rich telephony features. It also helped Connect number, with CCE providing an easy-to-navigate to Cardiff comply with the government’s social menu of core Council services. inclusion directive, which focuses on making Within the centre, inbound contacts are handled public services more accessible to citizens. by an agent staff of over 50. CCE produces “It delivered all desired communication channels, screen pops to an agent’s desktop, showing and it could deliver them in both English and the calling line identification (CLI) to identify Welsh,” Bignall explains. “Today, we deliver a the caller and to generate past call histories capability which includes phone-based support, for review. The same system is used to identify e-mail, text-messaging service, Web chat, citizens accessing Connect to Cardiff online, as it Council voicemail, and the scanning of letters for recognizes their inbound e-mail addresses. electronic distribution by Cardiff Council agents.
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“With so little experience at the Council, you ultimately that had no impact on agent training. would think training would be difficult. But it One feature agents have put into regular use is is refreshing for agents to be trained on the a toolbar enabling them to populate a reference Syntellect CIM system even though they have directory of their most frequently used numbers, had no past experience working with customer in order to promptly assist callers. The system interaction management software. They cannot automatically populates the toolbar with 10 believe how easy it is to use, especially the numbers to start, but once agents learned how softphone function.” they could personalise the list and create their Isabelle Bignall, Head of Contact Centre Services own directory of the most valuable “quick help CONNECT TO CARDIFF. Interestingly, Bignall numbers,” it became a genuine time-saving says just five of the original 22 agents that she device for agents and callers alike. hired had prior contact centre experience, but
“With so little experience at the Council, you would think training would be difficult. But it is refreshing for agents to be trained on the Syntellect CIM system even though they have had no past experience working with customer interaction management software. They cannot believe how easy it is to use, especially the softphone function.”
Isabelle Bignall, Head of Contact Centre Services
CONNECT TO CARDIFF
RESULTS
The centre handled 6,000 contacts the first Additionally, the U.K.’s Department of Trade month of operation, with just two percent of and Industry (DTI) is leveraging Bignall’s those contacts coming from non-telephony experience as a “Best Practice” reference for sources such as e-mail, text messaging other public sector contact centres. or Web chat. Bignall says that the Council In terms of non-telephony communication wanted to go through a pilot period to start, adoption, Bignall says that Web chat is by far handling all contacts in steady, sure fashion the fastest growing channel that citizens are and as she says, “not go for the big bang. As using. It has also helped the Council lower a government agency, we wanted to handle overall costs by making its agents more the needs of citizens and do so smoothly.” productive, as the more experienced ones Today, the contact centre is handling more can manage multiple Web chat sessions than 50,000 contacts each month with simultaneously. more than 20 percent of those coming via “We are happy to reach out to the full e-mail, text messaging, and Web chat. For community with such offerings as Web chat, her dedication in helping to make Connect which is especially helpful to citizens who to Cardiff a success, Bignall was named the are perhaps hard of hearing. It makes a U.K. Call Centre Manager of the Year by big difference for us on the social inclusion the Call Centre Management Association, front, as the people we serve have taken to winning the honor over more than 60 other it hugely.” nominees.
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With e-mail, Bignall says the Council fluent in the language. maintains standard responses in both But it is the contact centre’s unique ability English and Welsh in a knowledge library, to increase the Council’s level of social which keeps transaction times to a minimum. inclusiveness which most impresses Bignall. Of particular importance to the Cardiff She cites the case of Cardiff County’s pay Council is the ability of the combined system phone boxes, all of which are now part of the to produce useful statistical reports. These system. If a resident dials in from a public serve as valuable aids in monitoring call pay phone box, centre management realizes handling performance, evaluating staff the caller is not dialing from home and planning for future needs. and they likely do not own a mobile telephone. Bignall says that in addition to the standard CCE report views CCE catapults these callers on average call handling straight to the top of the times and call peaks and queue. Why? Answering troughs, the reports these calls first is also deliver important We are happy to reach out to important because information such the full community with such all agents realize as specific times offerings as Web chat, which is that the caller especially helpful to citizens who during the day are perhaps hard of hearing. It may be elderly when certain makes a big difference for us on and ill, or the Council services the social inclusion front, as the victim of a crime are requested the people we serve have taken to it on a street corner, most, by specific types hugely. or may have some of callers. Staffing needs other immediate issue at various points during while away from home. the day can be assessed These calls requiring timely much more quickly, allowing response are routed to one of management to respond in more three specially trained “pay phone timely fashion at given hours. box” agents for immediate handling. For instance, with Welsh language “Mitel and Enghouse Interactive callers, Cardiff Council carefully tracks Contact Center: Enterprise have teamed who is calling, how often, the nature of the to provide Cardiff Council with the ideal calls and how long those Welsh callers may solution for us,” Bignall concludes. “On the have been waiting in queue. Through the centre management side, CCE is stable and CCE’s reporting capabilities, Bignall detected adaptable. It’s like a vessel for us. You are not a recent spike in Welsh interactions, and in a situation where it steers you. You steer responded by hiring two additional agents it.”
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Enghouse Interactive’s integrated suite of solutions includes multi- enghouseinteractive.co.uk channel contact centre, self-service, attendant operator consoles and workforce optimisation. This wide portfolio places us in the unique position to offer customers and partners a complete, fully featured solution from a single vendor. These solutions support the full range of deployment methods from premise-based to private, public or community cloud and even hybrid requirements.