The goal was always to prioritise and handle every call with the utmost efficiency. This was made complicated due to a legacy phone system which struggled to filter calls and relied on drivers pressing buttons to navigate IVR options, putting safety at risk too.

As events snowballed, agents could end up fielding calls for issues that were already being resolved, further compounding matters. The on-prem system was also expensive to maintain and unable to effectively support remote working.

It wasn’t uncommon for our agents to get 15-plus calls on the same issue. They also had to deal with general information requests, diverting them from urgent incidents.

In providing a solid foundation for the agency to achieve KPI improvements, the Kerv cloud contact centre solution also underpins wider organisational targets. Along with a 90 percent average for customer satisfaction, the agency is better placed to maintain a strong safety record with 97 percent road network availability and 85 percent of all motorway incidents cleared within an hour.

The Kerv solution was easy to extend beyond the contact centre, enabling HR teams and claims handlers to enjoy the same benefits.

Building on that success, the agency rolled out the new cloud platform across its HR function. “We have one central and nine local HR teams,” adds the spokesperson. “Due to busy workloads our helpdesk used to suffer, resulting in high abandonment rates and cases being raised via other channels. Now, service levels are back to where they should be. Employees get served faster and many HR people are happier working from home.”

Similarly, claims handlers now benefit from feature-rich cloud contact centre features. Before, the team operated in isolation with no technical support. So, customers would phone the contract centre, tying up agents who would invariably end up having to transfer the call. Through predefined intelligent routing, those callers are now connected to the right team first time, reducing stray traffic by 50 percent in the process.

For us, the real driver was the need to noticeably improve public services for residents. To do that we needed to escape the role confusion that comes with over-broad IVR menus. Although our system presented customers with only four choices – option one for adult services, option two for child services, option three for highways, and option four for everything else – that inflexible approach was too hit and miss.

Not least because it relied on the customer understanding how the council functioned as an organisation to get themselves to the right place. In fact, wherever you are, not a lot of people have that kind of insight. In addition, the IVR couldn’t capture valuable data such as why citizens were calling or the nature of their requests. So, our general enquiries option had become an impenetrable black hole.

As well as self-service, we quickly discovered bots are great at doing the legwork and gathering valuable data. That’s also informed our plan. We now have several live bots dealing with specific customer journeys and are about to launch another to assist with general customer enquiries.

Yet, in many ways, the exciting part is still to come. In 2023, along with other local councils we’ll merge into a single unitary authority. But, on day one, it’s likely each council will still retain its own contact centre. So, we’re figuring out how to best streamline service and minimise disruption as we consolidate onto to a single inbound number.

That’s another many-to-many AI-powered communications opportunity where bots with speech recognition technology will be able to do the heavy lifting. For instance, helping smooth volume spikes and deflecting calls through self-service. Or identifying customer intent and routing calls to the right agent, right first time, thereby increasing efficiency by reducing transfers, emails, and call backs.