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By Veronica Fraser
 Contact centres are widely used by both the private and public sector as a means of ‘doing business' without having to go to a specific location. The public services consultant Kable estimates that spend on contact centres across the public sector will grow from c£350 million in 2006 to reach £530 million in 2010, so they are big business (the number of call centre employees recently topped the one million mark) with their own industry-wide tools and conferences.
Previously used almost exclusively in the private sector for high volume transactional services, contact centres are now used by universities, local authorities and central government to deal with inbound calls as part of an integrated customer service channel strategy.
Recent reports recognise some examples of good practice in the public sector but gauged customer experiences as varied - described as lengthy, expensive and frustrating by Parliament's Public Accounts Committee. Although not the worst of breed, when I took over management of a government department call centre in September 2004, there was certainly scope for improvement. For me, with a background in library and information services and no call centre experience, this represented quite a challenge - not least as my role included acting as head of complaints and knowledge management as well as managing the call centre.
What do government contact centres do?
As you might expect, the key role of a government contact centre is to answer enquiries about the work of the department. There are different patterns of organisation, with some call centres acting as a switchboard routing calls to the right policy lead and others referring more complex calls to a specialised team. My call centre is based in Whitehall as a purpose-built, 12-seat room established within a Customer Service Centre dealing with written enquiries. The call centre is responsible for answering telephone and email enquiries.
Although performance against targets fluctuated across the Centre, the drafting teams performed consistently better on volumes and timeliness than the call centre. Having established that the telephony we were using, if not state-of-the-art, was at least adequate, I focused on the remaining key resources - the people and the ease with which they could find the answers to the enquiries we received.
The Centre had developed from a pilot service centralising enquiry handling into one department and away from the policy leads themselves. From the beginning, temporary staff were recruited, trained to answer written correspondence within a ‘house style' and to established performance standards, and offered the opportunity to take national vocational qualifications (NVQs) in Customer Care and Business Administration. Most recruits are graduates and internet-savvy, but were not provided with search skills training. Although turnover in public sector contact centres is lower than private sector ones, as temps they tended to stay for varying lengths of time with an average tour of duty of about one year. This increased issues of continuity and shared experience within teams.
Creating and sharing the knowledge
Handling enquiries demands a minimum of two essential requirements - the ability to track correspondence and the means to provide accurate and up-to-date responses without constantly bothering policy leads.
The Centre worked with in-house IT developers to create a customer relationship management system (CRMS) known as Contact. Contact ‘recognises' previous contact from the same person or postcode, allowing us to identify repeat and multiple contacts. The system auto tracks workflows, giving individual case workers and managers instant access to performance data.
The Customer Service Centre was organised into teams based around ministerial responsibilities - answering enquiries, letters and emails using information ‘lines to take' provided by policy experts within the department. Under this system, drafters developed knowledge about their policy area, enabling them to get the most out of the data they held and asking other teams to help out with cross cutting areas. Information advisers in the call centre or in other teams could access very little of the information held by their drafting colleagues, and information exchange tended to be informal and on a need-to-know basis. Much of the information held centrally was written in a style suitable for briefing but not for answering a telephone call.
The Lines database
A first step was to pull together all the information we held into a searchable database - the Lines database. This database became the key knowledge resource for the Customer Service Centre. Its first phase in 2004 pulled lines that were separately held into a searchable database. This vastly improved life for the drafters, but call centre staff continued to find it hard to find the data they needed. I set a colleague the task of finding out what we needed to do to improve.
Users' recommendations for further development included:
- More systematic updating
- Improved search and retrieval
- Ensuring that information advisers could also use Lines
- Addition of or link to policy lead contact details
- Maintaining links between drafters and policy leads.
Overall, I wanted Lines to become a more flexible information resource, providing information in varying degrees of complexity and detail, depending upon need, and able to answer a more comprehensive range of questions. This extended the requirement for:
- Establishment of effective systems for capturing knowledge gained through contribution from a policy lead or from staff research
- Effective monitoring of the currency and accuracy of Lines
- Labelling of Lines so as to be clear that search facilities have improved.
- Better integration of Lines into the web of information resources available across the department.
Using collaborative tools
As our project to improve Lines took off, the department introduced two collaborative tools - Sametime (enabling informal ‘chat') and Quickplace (designed to improve collaborative working on policy papers and other documents). My knowledge team (of two) spotted the potential in these features for knowledge sharing across the Customer Service Centre.
A pilot with one drafting team demonstrated proof of concept and, once all the information held was quality assured and uploaded into a Quickplace (known as Linus), information advisers found that they could find answers quickly. One of the best features of this fairly basic system was that we could combine wide spread authoring - everyone was encouraged to contribute relevant data - with quality monitoring via team editors who ‘signed off' contributions before they were uploaded.
Our performance records show a step change from September 2004 onwards, with fewer calls abandoned as wait times improved, more calls answered and better information provided in response to oral and emailed questions - all with the same technology and the same number of information advisers.
So you just need a good database, then?
Being able to find the information is a cornerstone in providing a good answer. It boosted morale and made the work seem more achievable. The rest of the changes related to the people aspect of the job. Call centre attrition levels are notoriously high, although about 5% lower in the public sector compared to the private sector - influenced by competitive salaries. Turnover is exacerbated by lack of job fulfilment, pressure and anxiety.
To bring the call centre team up to and beyond the performance standards of the rest of the centre, I wanted to harness the collective knowledge and experience of staff and enthuse the team about raising standards. So we introduced:
- Recruitment aimed at identifying telephone skills as well as writing skills
- Training to establish telephone call handling standards, including dealing with difficult and distressed callers and complaint handling
- Search skills sessions
- Quality monitoring of email answers and amendments made to published resources
- 'Twinning' with policy areas to build up knowledge to be shared with team mates
- Visiting speakers from related telephone and knowledge services to extend knowledge.
Service transformation
In December 2006 Sir David Varney, a former Executive Chairman of HM Revenue & Customs as well as former Chairman of the telecoms company O2, published Service Transformation, a report aimed at encouraging a better value for money government service for citizens and businesses.
He recommended: formal accreditation by December 2008; a higher resolution of enquiries on first contact; reduction in ‘avoidable' contacts by ensuring that frequently asked and topical issues are easy to find on web sites and development of shared services. Work on continuous improvement goes on with plans for a new department-wide briefing system.
By Veronica Fraser
Veronica worked for many years in public library services, then for
the Library Association (now CILIP) before joining the Department of
Health in January 1997 as NHS Library Adviser, where she was the
commissioner for the initial NHS National Electronic Library for Health
(NLH) programme and the first NHS Copyright Licence for England.
More recently she was Head of Knowledge Management, Public Enquiries
and Complaints for the Department of Health in its Customer Service
Directorate, and has just joined the Department's Information
Management and Governance Team to work on Freedom of Information (FOI).
Veronica was a member of the Information Services National Training
Organisation and became a member of the Institute of Personnel and
Development whilst job sharing. Outside the department, she is a CILIP
Trustee and working towards becoming an NVQ Assessor - but secretly
would like to spend all her time in her garden.
FUMSI articles by Veronica Fraser »
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