Council’s contact centre looks beyond 10 years of continuous improvement

Vastly more channels and features

Telford & Wrekin Council combines non-metropolitan county and district councils’ powers for around 180,000 citizens in over 78,000 households in Shropshire. At the invitation of their partner Capita, an international professional services company, BrightCloud Group engaged with the Council in 2012. While Capita had provided voice- and email-based call centre services, a new omnichannel solution was sought to replace a small Cisco Unified Contact Centre Express (UCCX) system.

BrightCloud Group proposed a Cisco Unified Contact Centre Enterprise (UCCE) platform with vastly more channels and features. Gemma Hancox, Customer Contact Group Leader, Communities, Customer and Commercial Services at Telford & Wrekin Council, says: “Our call centre history was a sad tale of missed calls and long queues. BrightCloud Group’s solution, with Cisco UCCE, would not only provide monitoring tools and statistics for better performance oversight, but also allow us to offer customers an experience better suited to their individual needs.”

Digital channels of choice

The omnichannel UCCE platform manages calls, emails, and webchat, while providing the Council’s management with real-time insight into the performance of the contact centre, all the way down to individual agents. From the customer experience (CX) aspect, people can digitally connect right around the clock over the channel of their choice.

Making agents at once more satisfied and more productive, an enhanced employee experience (EX) means they get a varied menu of digital and voice channels. Not only suited to individual skillsets that means they can compare their performance against each other and form lasting relationships with the public.

In 2020, BrightCloud Group helped introduce customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, while its people transferred their knowledge to the Council’s IT staff so they were self-sufficient in running the CSAT app going forward.

“We had enormous volumes of basic queries to agents, such as asking about bin collection times, so we implemented a self-service platform based on UCCE integrations with Microsoft 365 and Dynamics. Most problems were solved by the customer supplying their postcode or providing a photo.”

– Gemma Hancox, Customer Contact Group Leader, Communities, Customer and Commercial Services, Telford & Wrekin Council

Centralisation sees many join the fold

As well as improving CX for inbound calls, the intent was to centralise service for things like access to the IT team, waste collection, and schools. In the latter case, people calling on an education-related topic would be steered by IVR direct to the right admin person rather than a general agent.

Coming to 2021, waste collection was identified as a particular problem. “We had enormous volumes of basic queries to agents, such as asking about bin collection times,” explains Gemma. “We implemented a self-service platform based on UCCE integrations with Microsoft 365 and Dynamics. Most problems were solved by the customer supplying their postcode or providing a photo.”

When it’s the resident’s fault, the system provides a recorded explanation to prevent a recurrence. The net effect is the outsourcer is incurring less under performance fines, call numbers are down, and agent number reductions have been possible.

Significant CCBox benefits

The unique CCBox system, built in-house by BrightCloud Group, includes call back to customers after they’ve spent 120 seconds listening to ring tone or announcements. That reduces irritating wait times, as customers maintain their positions in the queue.

CCBox also provides multi-channel call recording as part of the Council’s quality management (QM) programme, to screen calls and listen in for agent coaching opportunities and scorecard development. It helps with child safeguarding issues, too. Agent stats such as received calls, emails or chats are fed into a workforce management spreadsheet to measure QM and trigger reviews.

Allowing the Council to exercise full control over critical CX functions like real-time IVR menu adjustments, custom call-on-hold messaging, and instant channel diversions, CCBox makes the contact centre more responsive to customers’ changing needs. Gemma says: “Other benefits introduced by BrightCloud include the Cisco Multimedia Routing Engine, with clever queueing and intelligent routing to help manage the thousands of emails arriving daily. Queueing, once greater than 15 minutes, has been cut by more than half.”

“At every opportunity, BrightCloud people actively transfer their skills and knowledge to us, which means we recoup a sizeable amount by doing things ourselves that we used to have to pay for. Reducing the need to employ more than necessary expensive IT staff is a significant saving.”

– Gemma Hancox, Customer Contact Group Leader, Communities, Customer and Commercial Services, Telford & Wrekin Council

Pivoted messaging for productive agents

Further call queue reduction measures have seen webchat and bots adopted across 10 individual departments. Pivoting messaging away from calls to automated responses significantly benefits both employees and citizens. For example, monitoring the nature of customer queries provides the intelligence to populate answers to frequently asked questions and script new responses in real time. All without human intervention.

Furthermore, it makes the contact centre far more productive. Whereas a single agent can only answer and deal with one call at a time, the same agent can manage five or more live chats across 180 different services simultaneously. The same applies with internal communications, where EX is enhanced through quick replies to HR-related matters.

Skills transfer part of standard package

Given training by BrightCloud Group, the Council’s IT team was able to make changes contingent on COVID-19 such as arranging VPN-based home working and setting up custom messaging at peak times without further coaching or external expense. At the same time a community support facility meant communications could keep up with local issues and changing government guidelines.

Raising the contact centre game

The advantages of the self-service functions, automations, and bots described above have seen the Council able to bring forward the contact centre closing time from 7.00 p.m. to 5.00 p.m. while matching agent numbers to call volumes by time of day. Enhanced service levels and improved CX has seen customer satisfaction rise to 90 percent and above. Largely through improved efficiency.

“BrightCloud Group has helped us raise our contact centre game,” Gemma concludes. “New automation techniques and webchat are popular with our residents. We’ve not only seen call volumes fall by up to 37 percent, but also driven down inbound abandonment rates from over 35 percent to below five percent, with a 22 percent reduction in our longest wait time.”