The City of Gold Coast is Australia’s second-largest local government with a workforce of around 3,400 staff, and serving a quickly growing population of more than 550,000 residents. In order to support the wide range of services and facilities across the region, it is critical to have a knowledgeable, responsive, and flexible customer contact operation.
The Challenge
Ageing technology was not meeting the needs of the City’s Customer Contact branch, so a new platform was required which would meet the current and future needs across their contact centre and nine Customer Service centres. It was important to find a solution that could support a wide range of service channels within a single, cost-effective platform, with the flexibility to scale up and down as required.
City of Gold Coast undertook a formal tender process to find the most suitable solution, which culminated in the contract being awarded to Datacom, utilising the Interactive Intelligence CCaaS technology.
The Datacom Difference
Delivery of the solution proved challenging with a number of unforeseen issues and delays, but both organisations worked together to overcome these difficulties, and went live in late 2015. A total of 90 multi-channel front-line staff and 30 leadership/support staff can now use a single system across voice, email and face to face, enabling a complete real time view of the workforce and historical visibility of all channels, work groups and staff.
The Results
The ability to monitor and measure real-time customer flows has also led to an expansion of the City’s workforce planning capability to forecast accurately across all service channels and introduce the scheduling of all front-line staff into a single view utilising Interactive’s Optimizer tool. The availability of screen captures on all service channels has also seen an expansion of the City’s quality control programme, enabling quality evaluations across all service channels.
The City’s new call-back option has been positively received by customers and internal stakeholders. During peak periods, up to 30% of callers accept the offer of a call back, rather than waiting on the phone for the next available consultant.
“When going out to market for a new platform, our three main needs were finding an all-in-one technology solution, something that could support our current and future service channels effectively, and offer overall value for money. The Customer Interaction Centre has met these needs well, providing our operation with increased flexibility to manage our customer interactions, and increased real-time and historical visibility to drive efficiency. For a similar overall total cost to our previous system, we are also getting the increased benefit of being able to use this technology at our face-to-face Customer Service Centres, offer customers the option of receiving a call back, leveraging speech analytics capability, and we will shortly be launching web chat.”
Kirk Ratcliffe, Coordinator Support, Customer Contact, City of Gold Coast