Published on:
12
January 2007
Clackmannanshire is the only Council in the UK to be recognised as having best practice in a `mystery shopper' exercise aimed at assessing how well contact centres operate and how connected they are to council websites.
According to the Society of IT Manager (SOCITM) councils currently spend more than ten times as much money per query on answering phone calls than on providing services over the internet.
The society carried out the `mystery shopper' exercise, contacting councils with enquiries on education, building standards and planning issues.
Only one of the Council's - Clackmannanshire - gave a satisfactory response across all topics.
Barry Dickson, Head of Business Improvement and Technology said: "We are delighted that we have featured so well in this survey. To be rated as demonstrating best practice in all areas of the survey is quite an accolade when you consider we were up against far larger Scottish city councils and county councils in England."
The report says that most councils transferred callers around the organisation trying to find the answer when the information was already available on the website.
The exercise called "Better Answered" was designed to show the experience of dealing with local government by phone from a customer's perspective.
"Our website is already an award winner but most the value of that is lost if we are not pointing people to it and encouraging them to view the vast array of information available," added Barry.
The report also commended Clackmannanshire on the level of knowledge of its contact centre staff - and the efficient response from a senior planning officer to their query.
Garry Dallas, Executive Director of Development and Environmental Services said: "The contact centre does a great job in dealing with the vast majority of queries the council receives on a day to day basis. I am delighted that the SOCITM report shows the caller had a good response from our building standards and planning services. Customer care is very important to us, and was a major factor in our achieving Charter Mark status in 2005."
More details of the report are available on the SOCITM website www.socitm.gov.uk