Council's phone face give callers a buzz

Interface: Customer Service Representative Raina Bruorton at work. Monthly surveys show Raina and her colleagues are leaving callers with a good feeling.

Callers to the Christchurch City Council are giving it top marks for fast and friendly service and plans are under way to do even better.

A glance in the telephone book under Christchurch City Council shows more than half a page of listings for its many activities and services — from roads and water, festivals and parking, to noise to libraries.

Also listed are website and e-mail addresses and a range of 24-hour lines which give up-to-date recorded information about things like parking, rubbish collections on public holidays, dogs, festivals and events, and recycling.

That phone book list gives an indication of the scope of daily life in which the City Council plays an important role.

Different numbers direct callers to Customer Service Representatives who are trained to know about specific areas of Council service.

Network Manager Shona Willis, is to resolve 80 per cent of enquiries straight away.

“When a call comes in, we want to have people with the right knowledge answering the query,” she says. “We’re close to meeting that 80 per cent target. Some areas are well above that — things like calls seeking information about building consents, reports about a wandering dog or calls about rates.”

Since mid-1998 the Council’s Customer Service Centre Team — the people who answer the calls — have been working on three main goals, two of which have been achieved.

“The first one is to make sure that when a customer calls in, they get to speak to someone who knows about what they want, so that you’re not going to end up being passed from pillar to post,” says Shona Willis.

“Our surveys tell us we’re doing that well.” Every month the Council surveys 100 people who have called. A composite of the six mostrecent surveys shows more than 90 per cent were satisfied with how quickly their call was answered and with the level of understanding the staff member had about the issue they were calling about.

The survey also shows a satisfaction rating of above 90 per cent with the over-all knowledge, expertise and professionalism of the Council staff members they dealt with.

The second aim has been to make sure that if someone calls, they get to speak to a real person, not a recorded message. That, too, is being met. “When you call the Council you get to speak to real person who lives in the city just as you do, not working through a machine,” Ms Willis says.

That’s very important to a lot of our residents. “For people who are happy to deal with recorded-information lines, we do provide that and people find them useful.”

The third goal is to keep surveying people who come into contact with the Council and to keep improving the service offered.

To do that, the City Council has been working on a system to track work so that a caller can easily find out what is being done about their call and if there is likely to be a delay in getting something dealt with.

“People tell us in the surveys that they’re getting the right information and speaking to the right people but, with some of them, there’s a sense that what they’re asking for is getting lost,” Ms Willis says.

“We’re progressively working on a system where we can log all requests and track them as they are assigned and completed.”

In the not-too distant future, callers should be able to call back, give a number, and be told exactly what is happening about their call.

See pages 156 and 157 of the Telephone Book for all City Council listings. You can phone us from 8am to 6pm weekdays. Out-of-hours calls are handled by City Council sister company Orion, whose operators give a similar level of service to that offered during the day.