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Central Government, Technology

Government contact centres and citizen service

17 April 2007

Private sector organisations have used call centres for several decades. The public can telephone to book tickets, pay for their…

electricity and gas, check the availability of holidays, and order a wide range of goods and services. The advantages for customers are that they should receive a quicker service, they do not have to apply in writing or visit an office or retail outlet, and often they can contact a call centre outside normal working hours. The benefits for organisations are reduced costs - call centres do not have to be located in expensive high street locations and because of the support and back up provided by IT less expensive staff can be used to handle most routine calls. Quality monitoring and assurance is needed to ensure that the service provided is reliable, accurate and courteous.

Departments and agencies have responsibility for deciding whether to set up call centres to deliver any of their services and they usually do so on the basis of the potential to improve service delivery and value for money; to respond to a specific public concern for example, providing advice to citizens in the event of an outbreak of Bird Flu; and to realise potential to deliver services more cost effectively. In the largest survey of consumer attitudes in Asia Pacific (Source: Customer Contact World, 2004) over 75 per cent of respondents in ASEAN countries said they were content to receive advice and services from departments over the telephone, though younger people were more likely than older people to be willing to receive goods and services in this way.

The operational costs of contact centres are influenced by a range of factors for example, by the number of calls handled, the complexity and sensitivity of the calls, the extent to which automated call handling systems are used, the scope to achieve efficiencies through economies of scale, the complexity of the IT required to support the service and the expertise and experience of the staff needed to respond to calls.

Quality of service
According to research from the Customer Contact Management Association in 2006, the most typical ways used to monitor quality are listening to calls to assess how they are handled (61 per cent of call centres do this); monitoring complaints (57 per cent); measuring customer satisfaction (35 per cent); mystery shopping3 (31 per cent); recording calls and then reviewing them (33 per cent); and surveying callers on a range of aspects of the service they received (14 per cent).

The same research found that only half the population thought that it was reasonable to wait over 30 seconds for a call to be answered and 20 per cent expected a call to be answered within 15 seconds. A Public Sector Technology & Management survey of 82 government contact centres found that of the 61 contact centres which measured customer satisfaction, most reported satisfaction levels on average of 89 per cent and above.

Quality of service is largely assessed, however, in terms of the speed with which calls are answered and resolved courteously to the satisfaction of the caller. There is very little monitoring or assessment of the extent to which the advice provided was accurate and complete. Call centres which did do this had much better information on quality.

Rising call volumes
The pattern and volume of calls can vary considerably depending on the time of day and also the season. Call centres have therefore to deploy their staff carefully and ensure that they have IT in place to allow them to schedule and direct callers. Having too few agents or inadequate IT when calls peak will result in calls going unanswered or people having to wait a long time to receive a response. For example, in the United Kingdom the Child Benefit Centre answered 2.6 million calls but a further 5.4 million calls received an engaged tone. The Centre does not know how many times these callers had to redial and whether they eventually got through to an agent. Conversely, having too many staff when the number of calls is much lower will result in spare capacity which is not cost effective.

There are different ways of handling large volumes of calls so as to make the best use of staff time. Most people want their call dealt with by a person and there are some services where automated responses might be considered too impersonal or the options insufficiently flexible.

For certain types of public services, such as providing a wide range of advice and guidance and receiving requests for applications for government services such as benefits and student loans, call centres can be a cost effective method of service delivery and their use by regional government agencies has increased significantly over the last fours that Public Sector Technology & Management has been tracking them. The number of government contact centres we track in our PublicSource database has risen by almost a third in the last four years to 362. Despite this very visible sign of the success of the contact centres model, a survey of these 362 contact centres found that there were a number of ways in which performance could be improved.

Measure
Contact centres usually require a significant investment particularly in IT, the recruitment and training of staff and a commitment to a new way of delivering services to citizens. Alternative ways of providing the service and alternative ways of setting up call centres will have different impacts on costs and benefits for example, operating the call centre on a single site or a number of sites; having the call centre in-house or managed through an outsourced contract or a combination of the two, for example to deal with overflow work; the number of hours the centre is open; and the balance between using automated response systems and agents to take calls. All costs should be carefully considered against the intended benefits in a well developed business case. If a call centre is subsequently established its performance should be reviewed against the business case to assess the extent to which intended benefits are being achieved so action can be taken if they are less than planned.

Government agencies should identify the full costs and benefits of setting up a call centre in a business case and then routinely monitor the costs and performance of the call centre against the original business case to ensure that planned improvements in quality of service and efficiency are being achieved cost-effectively. Adopt a portfolio approach to assessing quality of service. Call centres use a range of measures to varying degrees to assess the quality of service which customers receive. One measure alone is unlikely to provide a full assessment of quality and most call centres use more than one but the tendency is to focus on the speed with which calls are answered and customers’ perception of how well their enquiry was handled rather than the quality of advice given. There is also a risk that some indicators can have an unintended effect for example, where call centres have a target to answer calls within a certain number of seconds this may result in staff devoting less time to each call to be able to answer calls more quickly. It is important that people should feel that they had the opportunity to speak to another human being and that their call was given serious consideration.

Departments should have a balanced mix or portfolio of indicators which give a more comprehensive, regular assessment of quality including the reliability and completeness of the advice which call centres provide. Ensure that reliable information is available and regularly monitored to give assurance that services are delivered cost effectively. Without such information call centres cannot determine whether their costs are reasonable for example, by benchmarking their performance with other call centres providing similar services, or consider options for reducing costs by reengineering existing ways of working or by amalgamating with other call centres.

All call centres should have access to reliable cost information and indicators, which show the unit cost of delivering each of their key telephone services to the public.

Peaks and troughs
The volumes of calls which centres receive are significant, and they will vary in number depending on the time of the day, week and also year. Some call centres are better at deploying their staff and using software to be able to handle fluctuating workloads than others.

For call centres to be able to deal with the calls they receive they need to use appropriate software to forecast the likely volume and incidence of calls and determine the most cost effective balance between automated response systems, flexible staffing, IT support, and outsourcing part of the work, to meet different levels of demand.

Conclusion
The contact centres model of aggregating demand for it to be cost-effectively processed is something which has since been taken up with alacrity by proponents of shared services. Just as it is now increasingly the received wisdom that there are substantial productivity gains to be secured through outsourcing activities – the continued growth of government contact centres looks set to go hand-in-hand with the aggregation of common services between agencies, and tiers of government.

As you can see from the success of Centrelink in Australia (see page 34, ‘Building a single point of contact’), the contact centre as the hub of citizen interactions, is perfectly in line with the likely future structure of government – where complex, common business processes are stripped out of the operations of line ministries, and placed in new centralised bodies with a view to maximising resource usage. The humble government contact centre is the shape of things to come.

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