Bayside City Council Self-Manages Service Delivery With Nortel Solutions
Announcement posted by Nortel 27 Oct 2005
The solution, designed by Nortel nPower system integrator 3D Networks, uses Nortels Symposium* contact centre technology with integrated third-party tools that work together to streamline interaction between residents and customer service operators across the Councils various departments.
Considering we have more than 50 staff each taking on average between 150 and 200 calls a day, without any way to monitor incoming calls we were simply losing out, and so were our customers, the residents of Bayside, said Mike Whittaker, Project Manager, Communications Strategy, Bayside City Council.
That prompted our search for a distributed contact centre solution with a more efficient way of managing our calls at departmental level. Were creating what we believe to be a unique solution for local government authorities in Australia to distribute the management of service calls and empower staff to self-manage their service delivery to customers.
The system, which uses a third-party tool called Barracouta, integrates with Symposium to give operators a view of how many calls are queued for their department, and how quickly their department is responding to incoming calls. In this way they can self-manage their own performance, with each department responsible for maintaining its service delivery levels.
The City of Bayside in Melbourne's southern bayside suburbs supports a population of more than 84,000 people and 33,000 households, with more than 35,000 dwelling spread across 37 square kilometers. Founded in 1994, the City includes the suburbs of Beaumaris, Black Rock, Brighton, Brighton East, Cheltenham, Hampton, Hampton East, Highett and Sandringham.
Barracouta places a bar across the top of a call agents screen that scrolls information such as the number of calls coming through to that group, and the number of group members logged in to the system, said Whittaker.
Using predefined rules, it can then alert group members when call rates are high, or when not enough agents are logged in to take incoming calls. A pop-up appears on agents screens when action is needed, encouraging them to attend to a problem without having to rely on outside instruction.
To my knowledge this is the first time this type of system has been tried at local government level and it owes much to the ease of use, integration and deployment of Nortels contact centre solution and its third-party integration.
Whittaker believes that by creating a self-managed system, the Council will give supervisors more time to attend to other important business, which in turn frees up more time for senior management and councilors from supervisory tasks.
The solution has solved the problem we had previously where agents with similar skill sets had to be in one location to answer calls because there was no way of getting specific calls to them in time from a central location, said Whittaker. Barracouta was then introduced to add visual cues for agents, allowing them to effectively manage themselves.
In an organisation like ours, where staff is dispersed in different departments, a traditional contact centre wallboard doesnt work because it cant be seen by everyone all the time. Barracouta gives us that wallboard functionality but brings it down to individual user level, so everyone is always aware of exactly whats happening in their group.
Bayside has set a target for answering 80 per cent of calls in 20 seconds or less.
Mark Stevens, President, Nortel Australia and New Zealand, said that while Bayside is not the only Council using Symposium, hes not aware of any other Council in Australia thats using a hybrid system to leverage the power of Symposium and deliver true distributed contact centre management at an organisational level.
What weve been able to demonstrate at Bayside is how our core technology platforms like Symposium can be used to deliver practical solutions for real world challenges, said Stevens. In this case weve been able to enhance the human experience for customers dealing with Council staff, and improved the Councils ability to better service their customers. This in turn motivates improved service delivery in a continuous cycle.
Nortel is a recognised leader in delivering communications capabilities that enhance the human experience, ignite and power global commerce, and secure and protect the worlds most critical information. Serving both service provider and enterprise customers, Nortel delivers innovative technology solutions encompassing end-to-end broadband, Voice over IP, multimedia services and applications, and wireless broadband designed to help people solve the worlds greatest challenges. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com. For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news.
Considering we have more than 50 staff each taking on average between 150 and 200 calls a day, without any way to monitor incoming calls we were simply losing out, and so were our customers, the residents of Bayside, said Mike Whittaker, Project Manager, Communications Strategy, Bayside City Council.
That prompted our search for a distributed contact centre solution with a more efficient way of managing our calls at departmental level. Were creating what we believe to be a unique solution for local government authorities in Australia to distribute the management of service calls and empower staff to self-manage their service delivery to customers.
The system, which uses a third-party tool called Barracouta, integrates with Symposium to give operators a view of how many calls are queued for their department, and how quickly their department is responding to incoming calls. In this way they can self-manage their own performance, with each department responsible for maintaining its service delivery levels.
The City of Bayside in Melbourne's southern bayside suburbs supports a population of more than 84,000 people and 33,000 households, with more than 35,000 dwelling spread across 37 square kilometers. Founded in 1994, the City includes the suburbs of Beaumaris, Black Rock, Brighton, Brighton East, Cheltenham, Hampton, Hampton East, Highett and Sandringham.
Barracouta places a bar across the top of a call agents screen that scrolls information such as the number of calls coming through to that group, and the number of group members logged in to the system, said Whittaker.
Using predefined rules, it can then alert group members when call rates are high, or when not enough agents are logged in to take incoming calls. A pop-up appears on agents screens when action is needed, encouraging them to attend to a problem without having to rely on outside instruction.
To my knowledge this is the first time this type of system has been tried at local government level and it owes much to the ease of use, integration and deployment of Nortels contact centre solution and its third-party integration.
Whittaker believes that by creating a self-managed system, the Council will give supervisors more time to attend to other important business, which in turn frees up more time for senior management and councilors from supervisory tasks.
The solution has solved the problem we had previously where agents with similar skill sets had to be in one location to answer calls because there was no way of getting specific calls to them in time from a central location, said Whittaker. Barracouta was then introduced to add visual cues for agents, allowing them to effectively manage themselves.
In an organisation like ours, where staff is dispersed in different departments, a traditional contact centre wallboard doesnt work because it cant be seen by everyone all the time. Barracouta gives us that wallboard functionality but brings it down to individual user level, so everyone is always aware of exactly whats happening in their group.
Bayside has set a target for answering 80 per cent of calls in 20 seconds or less.
Mark Stevens, President, Nortel Australia and New Zealand, said that while Bayside is not the only Council using Symposium, hes not aware of any other Council in Australia thats using a hybrid system to leverage the power of Symposium and deliver true distributed contact centre management at an organisational level.
What weve been able to demonstrate at Bayside is how our core technology platforms like Symposium can be used to deliver practical solutions for real world challenges, said Stevens. In this case weve been able to enhance the human experience for customers dealing with Council staff, and improved the Councils ability to better service their customers. This in turn motivates improved service delivery in a continuous cycle.
Nortel is a recognised leader in delivering communications capabilities that enhance the human experience, ignite and power global commerce, and secure and protect the worlds most critical information. Serving both service provider and enterprise customers, Nortel delivers innovative technology solutions encompassing end-to-end broadband, Voice over IP, multimedia services and applications, and wireless broadband designed to help people solve the worlds greatest challenges. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com. For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news.