Setting the Bar Even Higher

By Steven Conary, Helpdesk Manager

Awesome, Fast, Efficient, and Courteous... These are some of the words that are now being used to describe your Customer Support Call Center. As indicated by the recent Listening Tours, these were not the words that agencies used to describe the Call Center in the past. From the Listening Tours we obtained valuable feedback and concerns which we used to set our priorities to begin developing and changing the Call Center.

To that end, in April the Call Center began the changes by placing "on hold" music into the Call Center queue. This change was a result of a Listening Tour comment indicating that customers were not sure if their call had been dropped when put on hold as the line went silent. We also began displaying on all call center staff phones the number of calls in the queue. This allows staff to see how many customers are holding and for how long. Calls were monitored for a month to see where our weaknesses lie and at the end of the month we were able to determine the hours that needed additional coverage. With our current staffing and the off setting of additional coverage hours through our technicians, we were able to start covering the busiest times adequately. Lastly, we changed the call routing to first available agent, instead of priority driven logic.

Below are the statistics for the percent of calls answered and the second chart displays the decrease in number of dropped calls since January of this year.

As we move our central office from the Greenlaw building to the Varney building off Civic Center Drive , tentatively scheduled for 9 July, our Customers will see no disruption in service. This is a great opportunity for us to review our practices and improve our processes. As we progress, the service will only increase as we set the Bar even Higher.

Call Center Staff:

Missing from picture: Kevin Freeman, Richard Moreau, Sandy Botka, Lisa Hawkes, Joy Lazore, Dave Hansen, and Stephen Nichols