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Central Government

Building a single point of contact for Australian social services

By Jianggan Li | 1 August 2007

John Wadeson, Deputy Chief Executive Officer (DCEO) responsible for IT with Centrelink discusses the ongoing challenge of managing Australia’s largest government contact centre network. Interview: Jianggan Li.

Centrelink is an Australian government statutory agency, delivering a range of human services to the Australian community. With an annual budget of A$2.3 billion (US$1.9 billion), the government agency serves approximately a third of the Australian population – 6.5 million customers annually. It oversees the direct disbursement of A$63 billion (US$53 billion) in social security payments, and runs the largest government unified network of contact centres in the region – employing 25,000 staff and handling 31 million telephone calls a year.

Responsible for handling human services transactions across the full breadth of government social security schemes, the contact centre agents at Centrelink are expected to supply consistent, accurate answers to every enquiry – in up to 80 different languages.

“Handling this vast amount of information depends on the quality of the reference material you have, we spend a lot of money on very sophisticated reference documents, can be accessed in many different ways,” explains John Wadeson, Deputy Chief Executive Officer and Chief Information Officer of Centrelink [pictured]. “We are always putting new reference materials in place. So a lot of reference materials are provided, and the other thing is that for call centre people in particular, you have to have structured, you must have structured training, you’ve got to be prepared to pull them off the phones so that you can train them.”

Wadeson cites as an example the need to prepare staff immediately following a new government policy announcement: “In this case you know that people are going to ring you up about it on the following day, so we need to have a robust messaging system which enables us to inform our contact centre staff that government has made an announcement and there are five key things you need to know.”

Channel conflict?

The rise of the internet channel has, so far, not undermined the popularity of Centrelink’s telephone channel, though this is something which might change moving forward, says Wadeson.

“To be honest, I think that the telephone and the internet will continue to be complementary channels, and not direct alternatives. One of the interesting things, if you look at the banks, is that they all went through a ‘they are going to close all their branches because everyone is going on the net’. Are they? Of course they are not. Because what they have discovered is that there is something which you will always need the face-to-face option for,” he argues. “Human beings, in times of crisis, need to reach out to other human beings. So if you need to have a friendly face, you might as well make the most of it – and using people through the telephone channel helps ensure you can scale service delivery.”

Wadeson explains that the contact centre is also a good mechanism for taking the bureaucracy out of service delivery: “When you have a contact centre agent on the telephone, you know that their delivery is going to value-adding. They really are subject matter experts, and in their interactions with our citizens, they will have real conversations stripped of bureaucratic process. I think we saw this happen in the private sector, and I think we are seeing the same thing happening here in the public sector at Centrelink.”

Challenges and opportunity

With an IT shop the size of Centrelink’s, one of Wadeson’s biggest challenges is to ensure that the contact centres are deploying technologies that enable them to seamlessly integrate with Centrelink’s online and counter-based services.

“The key question you need to always ask yourself is whether you are getting the most out of the resources that you have. This is particularly acute in the contact centres environment,” he continues. “Labour costs form the largest single component of operating a contact centre. Getting best use out of that resource is critical to the performance of our operations.”

“Ultimately as the CIO, it comes down to your ability to judge where the business needs to be going,” he concludes. “You need to be backing decisions about technology, by linking them through to the wider business. So in this, the timing is everything. Getting the timing right to get the things done which need to be done is a challenge which never goes away.”

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