Siemens Communications has been selected by Glasgow City Council to assist with the implementation of one of the UK’s first local government multi-media contact centres.
Although contact or call centres are well established in the commercial sector, delivery of public services in this way is much more rare in the UK. The potential volume and diversity of transactions, which will be handled through the Access Glasgow contact centre, is unprecedented and is expected to exceed ten million calls a year. It will embrace not just telephone voice contacts but also other forms of communication, including fax, email and Internet,
The plan is to make those services available over the telephone or on the web eventually from 8am to 8pm Monday to Saturday and provide a single point of entry for end-to-end resolution of queries and problems, having been designed to dramatically reduce the frustrating experience of being passed from person to person
The council believes that this Access Centre will handle more than half of the 20 million enquiries it receives every year, which currently fall into over 100 general categories. Introducing it should have a significant effect on the workload of many council employees. The City Council is especially happy about the development because it expects to make savings up to 5%, from the wider project, called Access Glasgow, of which the Access Centre is an important part.
The key components of the Access Centre solution being supplied by Siemens are HiPath ProCenter - designed to connect citizens to the right council staff, first time - and Peregrine’s Remedy Customer Support solution - which is intended to ensure that all enquiries and transactions are dealt with as effectively and in as timely a manner as possible.
HiPath ProCenter is an award winning contact routing application developed by Siemens which will enable the Council to optimise the handling of citizen communications across all departments, services and media channels. Its advanced skills routing capabilities mean that the precise needs of each caller are determined and are then translated into a virtual group of council staff who are best suited to deal with them.
The proposed desktop solution, based on Remedy Customer Support solution, will enable the council to greatly enhance the number of enquiries resolved first time by providing streamlined access to the supporting systems and information sources required by staff to fulfil their roles.
Currently staff are organised in departmental silos and have skills and knowledge relating to selected services and related applications. The objective of the Access Centre is to consolidate the provision of such services into a common area, enabling the council to make best use of staff resources and offer citizens greater consistency and accessibility of services.
It is recognised that this will place significant demands on staff in terms of the knowledge and skills that they will need to deal with an increased range of services. As a result, the proposed Peregrine solution will act as a common, user-friendly, front-end for dealing with council enquiries and will deliver scripts and other aids to guide staff through the wide range of services that are offered. Where citizen requests cannot be dealt with immediately, or where follow-up actions are required, the Siemens Peregrine solution will automatically assign such activities to the designated staff and will track them through to resolution, according to agreed service levels. This means that all activities relating to a citizen are recorded and are visible to staff and management alike.
Elma Murray, Depute Director of Financial Services, Glasgow City Council, said “The council selected Siemens Communications because it was looking for a single supplier that was capable of delivering a turnkey contact centre solution, and that had a technology strategy that matched the Council’s vision for Access Glasgow”
Through its Advanced Customer Solutions (ACS) Siemens offers one of the most comprehensive portfolios of Contact Centre, CRM and Mobile Business services available in the UK. ACS solutions comprise state-of-the-art and award-winning technologies in combination with a comprehensive suite of professional services. Solutions are tailored to meet the needs of both public and private sector organisations and are delivered in conjunction with technical design, implementation, training and lifelong support.