Cllr Ruth Bennett, Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance, Resources and Transformation, explains now improving customer service is a vital part of our transformation journey.
Liverpool City Council’s Contact Centre takes a huge volume of calls every year.
In 2023-24 alone, based on trends from previous years, we are expecting to take nearly 850,000 calls from residents. There can be peaks, for example when we’ve had extreme weather conditions, or when new school places are allocated.
For many of our more vulnerable or digitally excluded residents, the Contact Centre can be a very important way for them to access the services they need to live independently.
But for many people, there are often other ways to get the help they need that are far more convenient for them and more efficient for us, meaning that we can concentrate our resources on those residents that need them most.
Through the work of the Customer Excellence Programme Board, we have started an ambitious project which is hoped will reduce the amount of calls we receive by around 200,000 every year. This work has included a range of small but impactful operational changes such as ensuring our web content is always fully up-to-date and easily accessible.
It has also included a longer-term project to understand how better to improve the resident journey in ten of our most in-demand services, by designing new ways for people to resolve their queries themselves, or through other digital means such as the website, or other online applications.
So far, this combination of operational and transformational change has resulted in 18,500 fewer calls in 2023 so far, which is very encouraging progress for the programme as a whole.
This work is continuing with a focus on helping the majority of residents to opt for self-service, so that we can focus the efforts of our brilliant Contact Centre team on serving the residents who need that help the most.
It’s a great example of how transforming our services is delivering better services and better experiences for all our residents.
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