Stirling makes the right call

Call centres are commonly thought of in terms of their role in the marketing and customer service strategies of insurance companies, financial services businesses, technology companies and similar large organisations.

Yet one of Perth’s busiest call centres is run by an organisation far removed from that consumer-focused segment of the business spectrum.

In a ‘normal’ week staff at the City of Stirling’s customer contact centre answer more than 4,000 calls and, even though results can’t be measured by sales, the centre is considered a significant success.

The council first had the idea for a call centre in 2000, but the operation did not get under way until 2002, when the decision was taken to have a manned call centre instead of an electronic prompt system.

The council’s customer service co-ordinator, Peter Wynne, said the decision to move away from the old switchboard system of answering calls was made to increase the number of calls the council could take at a time.

“There are two key benefits of the centre. One is that it has increased the level and quality of service and accessibility to the City of Stirling and secondly, we can separate the everyday queries from the more technical,” he said.

“So instead of calls being immediately transferred to departments and technical staff, we assess the calls and only transfer the calls we can’t assist. In the majority of cases we can assist.

“This process has freed up more time for the technical staff.”

The aim of the contact centre – which the city claims has boosted ratepayer satisfaction and has won two WA Local Government Awards – is to provide ratepayers with a question and answer service during a single call.

Contact centre inquiries range from change of address, building licence application status and zoning inquiries, to emergency call outs.

Mr Wynne said the centre handled more than 40 per cent of building department inquiries, more than 50 per cent of planning inquiries and 90 per cent of rates inquiries.

“The most inquiries we receive each week are about domestic waste. Bins that have been stolen, damaged and missed during collection,” he said.

“And the city’s internal customers are also well catered for, with the contact centre providing service, assistance and support to all of the 18 business units within council.”

Mr Wynne said the centre’s performance targets included the answering of 80 per cent of calls within 30 seconds and dealing with 75 per cent of customer inquiries without having to transfer the call.

He said the emphasis of the contact centre was on “call outcome”, or quality, rather than “call turnover”.

The number of contact centre staff working each day varies. On average there are seven but there is the capacity to have 15 staff on the phones at any one time.

“We know our busiest days and times and therefore we can roster staff accordingly,” Mr Wynne said.

“Monday mornings are without a doubt our busiest time. We receive more than 1,000 calls every Monday.

“Our quietest day is Thursday and there are three peaks in each day – 8.30am for one hour, 11.30am to 1pm and again at 3.30pm.

“Because people know we are accessible they call because they know they can get through.”

The customer contact centre uses an automatic call distribution (ACD) telephone system. It operates through the workers’ computers, so when a call comes in the system decides which officer is next in line to take a call and sends the call to their desk.

If that worker is busy, the system sends the call to the next available operator.

 If all workers are busy the caller is placed on hold in a queue, with waiting time at this point averaging less than 30 seconds.