Councils enrich experience with multi-channel engagement

The councils were keen to introduce webchat functionality and use Liberty Converse’s conversation flows and text snippets for automated answers and prompts. This saves time for agents as they don’t need to type long answers each time. Finding it easy to set up, they trained a member of the team to enable the same functionality to be used in other areas of the contact centre.

Automated answers help with frequently asked questions that are simple and factual to resolve.

They also utilise a simple chatbot to enable accurate routing of the conversation to the correct agent. For example, a caller types “I’ve had a council tax reduction, but it’s not yet shown up on my bill?”  and an auto answer of “Why is my council tax reduction not showing on my bill – is this what you’re asking?” pops in, allowing the customer to confirm. The next auto answer gives a pre-prepared text snippet answering the question. This query is resolved for the customer, without a member of the team needing to be involved. If they answer “no that’s not my question”, the chatbot immediately hands over to a member of the team to respond within the same chat conversation.

Webchat was introduced for three key areas which had traditionally caused customers to come into council reception: council tax, housing benefit and parking. Customers now get routine enquiries solved right away, reducing wait times and avoiding frustration and unnecessary travel to the council office. The contact centre team is freed up to handle more complex, higher-value enquiries and half the reception team can now work remotely, responding to webchats.

Staff can oversee more than one chat at a time, helping multiple customers simultaneously. Often webchats are simply chasing online requests, which are now immediately highlighted to the back office, preventing calls into the contact centre.

The contact centre team fed back that they now enjoy more variety and flexibility in their workloads. And customers like it: on average 11% of contact is currently webchat.

Most contact centre agents now work from home – roughly 80% working remotely each day. The plug-and-play nature and integration with Microsoft Teams means staff no longer need an actual phone on the desk. With a laptop and headset, they can take calls wherever they choose.

Liberty Converse’s integration with Microsoft Teams boosts agent efficiency because they can seamlessly connect with the entire organisation through Microsoft Teams calls and messages within the Liberty Converse contact centre application.

This has proved popular with staff as they enjoy great collaboration and teamwork, whether working from home or the office. The councils can offer an enhanced employee experience. For customers, the experience is also enhanced by reduced handling time.

The contact centre team loves the call back function.

If the team cannot get to all calls during a busy period, customers are offered a call back. Paying respect to customers by avoiding waiting in a queue improves their experience.

It also means the team can quickly handle the call backs after busy times, setting up overtime where needed to ensure things are resolved that day.

Wandsworth and Richmond have automated the process for setting up direct debits and refunds for council tax – a great time saver and fast customer resolution.

Using a voice form, directly integrated into the council tax and finance systems, enables information to be instantly pulled and actioned.

For example: a customer moves house and the council sends a closing bill showing a credit on their account. The customer calls, choosing the option for refunds, speaks their details using Liberty Converse’s speech recognition. At the end of the call, the process is automated to check everything is correct and administer a refund. All without staff involvement.

It’s removed a whole chunk of calls from the call centre and eliminated form filling, data entry and manual processing. A refund used to take about 10 minutes to process for staff on a call. Now its processed at once. It used to take two to three weeks to process a paper form for a refund. Now, everything happens automatically. The direct debit is in place within a working week – a great result for the customer.

Wandsworth extensively use voice recognition to direct switchboard calls, removing a large volume of calls for switchboard staff to handle.

As well as routine calls, when a new initiative, telephone number or service goes live, it’s easy to add new utterances which callers might use. They are immediately in use, helping to direct calls across the council automatically.

This has enabled a big saving in staffing. Whilst there’s a time investment in regularly updating the utterances, it presents a significant saving in time and staff resource.