sponsored by Asidua
Presented to the local authority or central government department that can demonstrate improvements in call handling, customer complaints management, staff training and staff retention.

Winner: Surrey County Council
In 2010 Surrey County Council developed its ‘Delivering the Customer Promise’ training, which is in the process of being rolled out across the organisation. So far 209 have attended the course and delegates have rated the course highly. The training is interactive and focuses on the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills of customer service - managing customer expectations, how to design and deliver customer-driven rather than governance-driven processes, and how to empower and encourage teams to deliver excellent customer service. Raising awareness on how slicker, bureaucracy free processes can enhance customer service has resulted in savings of over £500,000 across the organisation. There has been a significant reduction in ‘chaser’ calls and cost per contact has reduced to 79p to 49p.

Commended: Derbyshire County Council
Staff engagement, training and development is at the forefront of Call Derbyshire’s success. The centre’s induction programme places emphasis on soft skills, and agents take part in workshops designed to help them handle difficult situations. These sessions run alongside traditional classroom style training aimed at developing legislative awareness and service knowledge. The contact centre uses a buddy approach - helping encourage teamwork and foster strong working relationships. As the centre’s service portfolio has grown, the ability to quickly respond to changing operational priorities has become more critical. Skill based routing has been introduced to more effectively deliver calls to an appropriately trained agent and a skill matrix provides the management team with an overview of agent training. To ensure staff retain skills they have bi-monthly one to one meetings including an evaluation of services handled over the period. This helps highlight the need for refresher training and provides an opportunity to discuss any development needs.

Commended: Wokingham Borough Council
One of the ways in which Wokingham Direct staff are given the opportunity to ‘get stuck in’ early is through the use of its ‘Contact’ system for email management. This allows team leaders to quality assure all emails before they are sent and is used as a tool for new starters to get familiar with processes and services in a practical way which is risk free for the organisation. By checking every email that goes out, team leaders are able to give invaluable feedback and coaching to the new starters and they are able to see where changes have been made to their responses. They are also much more confident with their responses once they move onto the phones. All team members are given feedback during monthly one to ones, and encouraged to listen to their own calls. Using feedback from an annual mystery shopping exercise, both positive and negative behaviour can be identified and shared. As a result of these measures Wokingham Direct was named number one council in the 2010 Top 50 Call Centres for Customer Service. Customer satisfaction has been above 95% for the past 12 months, an improvement from around 50% before Wokingham Direct came into operation.