A HUGE surge in telephone calls to Warrington Borough Council’s contact centre, combined with staff shortages, has led to delays in dealing with enquiries.
Action is being taken to bring in extra staff to try and meet demand – and the council has apologised and thanked residents for the patience they have shown.
Chief officer for customer access Steve Park said: ““We’d like to apologise for the temporary reduction in service standards, and thank residents for their patience.
“Last week we received 5,706 calls, which is 30 per cent more than what we were getting at the end of June. Some 2,388 of these calls – that’s 44 per cent – related to benefits, council tax and summonses.”
The contact centre has been short-staffed for the last few weeks due to a combination of staff sickness and pre-booked holidays coinciding with maternity leave and some natural vacancies as former staff have moved on to other jobs.
In the last few weeks telephone response times have grown to more than 10 minutes, which is significantly longer than the previous average response time of four to five minutes.
Mr Park added: “We are taking some urgent steps to address this. We have already transferred three colleagues from other council departments to help the team and I am really grateful that the managers and frontline staff have kindly agreed to work extra hours whilst we try to fill remaining vacancies through external recruitment.
“It may be the case that some callers would be able to access council services in other ways. For instance it’s possible to do all sorts of things via the council’s homepage at www.warrington.gov.uk and we have some innovative iPhone applications that people can use for reporting issues.”
For more information about accessing council services online, see www.warrington.gov.uk/info/200908/digital_strategy/1346/council_services_online.
Picture: The contact centre in Horsemarket Street.
Council hit by surge in 'phone calls
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Gary Skentelbery
Experienced journalist for more than 40 years. Managing Director of magazine publishing group with three in-house titles and on-line daily newspaper for Warrington. Experienced writer, photographer, PR consultant and media expert having written for local, regional and national newspapers. Specialties: PR, media, social networking, photographer, networking, advertising, sales, media crisis management. Chair of Warrington Healthwatch Director Warrington Chamber of Commerce Patron Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace. Trustee Warrington Disability Partnership. Former Chairman of Warrington Town FC.
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I tried to phone the council contact centre office on two ocassions in May, on each ocassion I was put in a queue with a recorded message telling me how important my call was to them and that I would be answered shortly. The first call remained in the queue for 15 minutes and never got answered, the second call was exactly the same and I was on hold in the queue for 12 minutes with no answer. Now whilst its very nice for Steve Park to apologise generally, does this mean he won’t be refunding the £2.85 that i had added to my phone bill following the calls ? After all I didn’t receive a satisfactory service so surely these charges should now be refunded to me and also anyone else who has run up such charges.
Maybe they could credit my council tax by the amount of wasted call costs but I won’t hopld my breath !!
So they didn’t know in advance of and plan for staff leaving, holidays and maternity leave? Isn’t that what managers are for?