Inform Communications

Introduction

• As with all local government authorities, Sandwell Council faced the challenges of improving service delivery to their residents whilst making considerable cost and efficiency savings.
• The Council was struggling to cope with increasing customer demand for Revenues and Benefits services and the associated high volumes of enquiries led to high rates of call abandonment and slow work processing times. Line capacity issues further compounded the resource shortfalls. Main billing and peak recovery were looming, and a new call handling strategy was required to support them through this very busy period.
• Self Service was introduced as an efficient, low cost automated service to provide consistent, accurate information to every caller, allowing them to receive advice and guidance, order relevant forms, transfer to payment lines, or be directed to other sources of information in an easy to use, accessible way. Callers with more complex or urgent enquiries could be transferred to specific agents where required.
• Self Service was initially trialed via a six month pilot for Revenues and Benefits to cover main billing 2011 and after a review of the financial, operational and customer service benefits it delivered, has been extended for a further year.

Objectives/Priorities

• A commitment to help improve and enhance customer service across the Revenues and Benefits departments without any associated increased costs.
• Sandwell Council wished to extend the 24/7 service provided by its website to all residents who chose to communicate with them by telephone.
• To reduce the high call abandonment rates resulting from a significant shortfall in call handling resources relative to service demand. This would become a bigger problem over Main Billing 2011.
• To reduce work processing times which were lengthy and not in line with targets.

Operational and Financial benefits

• Since implementation, Self Service has successfully answered over 131,000 enquiries at an average of approximately 25,500 per month.
• Only 36% of callers chose to transfer to advisors, with 64% having their enquiry successfully resolved by Self Service at a totally inclusive cost of less than 2 F.T.E's
• This would require 13.3 agents to handle every call manually, with an equivalent annual cost of value of over £332,000 p.a.
• Abandonment rates have reduced to zero.
• Staff time can now be spent on the callers who need direct interaction, either because they are vulnerable or have priority cases that need agent assistance. Work processing times have been reduced.
• Customer satisfaction is up as people can now be certain they will be able to obtain information round the clock as opposed to trying to phone at inconvenient times with the knowledge that they may need to wait in lengthy queues for information.

'Self Service has played a crucial part in our call handling strategy for 2011, and we are pleased to announce we will be extending our partnership with Inform Communications for another year.'

'The cost and efficiency gains we have made since implementing Self Service within our Revenues and Benefits call centre have been considerable. Coupled with this is the greatly improved 24/7 service to our customers who can now access Revenues and Benefits information round the clock without waiting in lengthy queues or being told we are closed.'

Ian Hubball, Revenues and Benefits Manager