Councillor John Russell commented:

"Like so many other individuals who try and contact Lewisham Council by phone to speak with a human being, I was outraged at having to wait so long. In the end I had to hang up out of sheer frustration, not knowing if my call would ever be answered.

"This seemed quite strange since the Council proudly displays a pledge in the Council Civic Suite and other places claiming that, "all calls will be answered within 15 seconds" and yet as a Councillor trying to contact another person I regularly spend a large part of my working day waiting on the phone to Lewisham.

"The pledge appeared to operate by placing all calls into an automated queue within 15 seconds. The answer to my Council question (below) confirms that this is indeed the case. The Council can't even monitor how long it takes to get put through to an actual person and apparently does not view this kind of information as being terribly important as long as we are held in a queue. Nor does the Council keep track of how many callers have to hang up out of frustration, before being able to speak to someone. This pledge is clearly not worth the paper it is written on.

"The fact that the council has no means or methods of monitoring how long it takes to speak to a person rather than a machine means that they never have to address the fundamental failings of the system that are experienced by thousands of Lewisham residents who use these and other council phone lines. Frankly, in this day and age this level of appalling customer service is not good enough.

I will continue to peruse this issue and I sincerely hope that that the council will recognise the central importance of customer service in the future by doing something about the situation instead of acting like the bad work person who conveniently blames their tools."

19th July 2007


NOTES

Question - from Councillor Russell to the Cabinet Member for Customer Services 18/07/07

The Council pledges to answer all phone calls within 15 seconds. Does the Council monitor how long it takes members of the public to be connected to a human being and not simply to an answer phone for the Council Tax and Council Tax Benefits line 020 8690-9666 and the Housing Benefits line 020 8690 8444 and all other customer service phone lines?

If this information is collected and monitored: what is the average waiting time over the last year for each of the two lines listed and in what way does the Council use this information to improve service performance?

If this information is not collected and used for these two or other customer service phone lines, does she feel the public pledge has any real value and will she be rewording the pledge for all Council phone lines accordingly? Will she further consider how this information could be collected, if it is not, and used to improve customer service across the council and report back to council on this matter?

Reply

The Council's call centre technology is old and does not distinguish between the number of calls answered within 15 seconds by a person or the automated system. However, it does enable us to review the average call waiting time. The average call waiting time across all call centre services last year was 1 minute and 10 seconds. For Council Tax it was 3 minutes 30 seconds and for Benefits it was 1 minute 45 seconds.

The average waiting time performance is inflated because there are 'Q Buster' calls in the queue. The 'Q Buster' service allows customers to leave their telephone number on the system and hang up but keep their place in the queue. When the customer comes to the front of the queue the 'Q Buster' system calls them back and they can immediately speak to a member of staff. The system has been in use for a while and customer feedback is very positive. However, a side effect is that it increases the waiting time for those that do not want to leave their telephone number.

The Callpoint service is working hard to improve performance and uses performance management information to do this. Everything is managed from individual performance through to service performance. In addition to the 'retrospective' management the service also monitors performance as it happens and allocates staff to service areas in response to queue lengths. The performance information is also used to plan service delivery. For example, using performance information the service can predict demand and resource accordingly.

Speed of response is important but so is the quality of response. Each month 200 customers are surveyed to find out what they thought of the Callpoint service. Last month 86% of customers were either satisfied or very satisfied with the Callpoint service. In October 2006 the figure was 81% and satisfaction has been improving steadily each month.

The Council's customer service strategy includes upgrading the call centre technology. An upgrade would allow the Council to deliver a much improved call centre service, generate efficiencies and give access to improved performance management information including the time it takes to speak to a person.

Simple performance measures, such as the time to answer a call, are important in communicating the level of service we aim to provide customers. The customer service strategy will ensure the Council invests in up to date technology which will deliver better services and the ability to measure and demonstrate this using performance information. Progress on the implementation will be reported to members at regular intervals.