Central Coast Council has faced some significant challenges over the past few years, not the least a financial crisis which resulted in staff layoffs, having to take out emergency loans, as well as a reduction in services being delivered to the community.
With the financial crisis now over through implementing a very solid financial recovery strategy, council’s resolve to re-building trust in the community is a priority, in particular in the customer service experience.
Listening and hearing customers is paramount.
A major impediment for the Customer Service team was they didn’t have the best platform or technology to provide customers with a quality experience.
A key issue was ‘call quality’. Customers and staff were continually frustrated by the call quality and customers were often cut off, resulting in a poor staff and customer experience and many complaints.
After researching possible alternatives, council reached out to the NSW Department of Customer Service (DCS) Government Technology Platform (GTP) group, who use the Genesys Virtual Contact Centre (VCC) across many services within state government, to see if council could utilise the VCC technology.
After receiving a positive answer, the project moved quickly and council in partnership with the DCS GTP team, co-designed a solution which was implemented in October 2022. Central Coast Council was the first to implement the VCC as a NSW Local Government Authority.
The result has been a significant improvement in call quality, customer and staff experience and cost savings for the community.
The project has also had a positive outcome internally at council, and not only for the Customer Service team. From concept design to implementation our internal teams of IT, Customer Experience and Water and Sewer enhanced their working relationship. The codesign team met for 3 months during design phase and used best practice to ensure all call queues, customer experience opportunities, training, and workforce management planning options were available.
The relationship built with the GTP group and council also ensured that the solution met all council’s business requirements.
The development of the VCC with GTP group provided council staff the opportunity to build and configure the solution with new features like Workforce Planning Management, a call back feature, improved reporting, visibility of interactions and improved call recordings. Council also listened to the community feedback and implemented a new local number, rather than the 1300. The new number is much simpler to remember and is more cost effective for council and the community.
Council Customer Service went live with the new system on 13 October 2022, including with council’s water operations team, it was a seamless and positive experience for implementation.
The intended objectives for the project were:
1. Reduce Customer Service operating costs.
2. Provide a seamless agent and customer experience.
3. Minimise contact centre infrastructure and CCC IT service support –self serve product owner with DCS support service model.
4. Provide workplace flexibility and business continuity.
5. Reduce average handle time and increase first call resolution for customers.
6. Support and integrate with Oracle CX as the management system for CCC customer records.
While the majority of objectives have been achieved, including a significant drop in call ‘abandon’ rate, some are yet to be realised, including a reduction in the average handle time (AHT) due to staff turnover, training new staff, and the need to improve our knowledge base. Council is continuing to work on meeting these objectives.
Council will continue to scale up services including introducing script transcript of customer conversations, proof of concept of using the IVR, connecting Genesys and Qualtrics for our Voice of the Customer program, as well as bringing council’s Credit Management team onboard next financial year.
The success of this project has demonstrated council’s focus on thinking outside the square to deliver on what both the council and the community wants – an excellent customer service experience which delivers outcomes.
