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Modern day sweat-shop? What a lot of nonsense!

Paddy Clarke is a man with a long history in customer service. He worked at Yorkshire Electricity and then NPower before moving to Leeds City Council 5 years ago.

When Paddy arrived to take over the organisational mess which constituted the Council’s customer service helpdesks, he had a huge job on his hands. I met with him in Seacroft shortly after he joined at one of the Council’s many little helpdesks scattered across the city, none of which had an idea of the level of service they provided. The Council had an appalling record for the speed of answering calls and even answering them at all. At one point it was thought that around ¾ of all calls were abandoned by customers before getting through. This was not the fault of the staff but the organisation and management.

Paddy was at the heart of the plans to create a 21^st century, first class ‘contact centre’ to handle all customer calls, letters, e-mails and latterly even text messages.

I met up with Paddy recently to have a tour of the facility I’d visited a couple of years ago after it first opened. For several years at BT I managed a project with a customer helpdesk and so I have a fair idea about some of the myths and truths about running contact centres.

Leeds City Council is at the very forefront in its use of technology in this field and this is not one of those “In the future we will…” type claims, nope, this is a case of “Look at what we do now.”

The Council receives many hundreds of thousands of calls each year and any major problem can have the phone lines running wild, such as a flash flood. Some time back Paddy introduced ten or so ‘Silver Numbers’. These are phone numbers which get customers directly to people skilled in answering them, taking the right details and hopefully sorting problems right away with no hanging around. More latterly we have the new ‘Golden Number’ – 0113 2224444 - which gets callers through to a team of skilled staff who can deal with 90% of queries right away but naturally to a lesser depth.

Each day a small team of planners use a clever computer system called Blue Pumpkin (who comes up with these names?). It uses real data about call volumes, the skills of each member of staff, even their planned holidays, lunch breaks and team meetings to make sure the contact centre can answer calls coming in with the minimum customer wait. Furthermore, if there was a big delay in answering calls for customers at some point, managers can even run scenarios to see if they could have avoided it by training a few staff members in a different area of Council services. As a result, the number of calls answered within 20 or so seconds is consistently well over 90%, better than most utilities companies I’d bet. Why is it not 100% in 20 seconds? Well, the cost of staffing-up to deal with that would not be value for money for Council Tax payers.

So what about the staff, stuck in a job, monitored and measured all the time? Well it doesn’t quite work like that. For a start this is no dead-end job as many people promoted up the chain will tell you. The environment is a state of the art, airy, air conditioned centre with places for staff to take breaks. Many staff are on ‘flexitime’ contracts and so if the day seems quiet, they can ask their team leader if they can leave early or book a day off in advance. Assuming Blue Pumpkin predicts there will not be enough calls to worry that team at that time, off our worker goes to take up any overtime he or she has built up. They are also able to offer part-time hours suiting both the demands of customers calling in as well as the wishes of the staff around family ties.

Another real positive is the ‘Academy’ scheme Paddy introduced around 4 years ago. This takes people with either different skills, maybe no customer service experience or computer experience, or people who have been out of work for a while and it trains them up from scratch. In return, the number of staff who have left has been just two out of over 40 graduates of the scheme in 4 years. This shows the investment pays off and staff must like their jobs.

For the future we will see customers given the option of talking to an automated service that understands people’s voices if the staff are all busy. There is also a huge amount of work going on to improve customer service in the rest of the Council so that the people picking up the customer requests or problems have the same customer service attitude that the contact centre does, which will massively reduce the number of chase up calls from customers and complaints.

It’s great to see the many innovations, too many to discuss here, and the improvements made over the years. It’s also great to see a genuinely enthused workforce which is down to Paddy and his team of impressive managers, support staff, planners, team leaders and Customer Support Operators.

In my previous line of work, I have not come across a centre of this calibre in the public or private sector. I wish them every success in their plan of continual improvement. Don’t believe me? Try giving them a call next time you have problem, I hope you’ll be more than satisfied with your experience.

All the best

Matthew Lobley

Roundhay Ward Conservative Councillor

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