The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames has launched a new customer service quality initiative focused on improving service across all its customer touch points' in a bid to resolve more customer problems at first point of contact, avoid unnecessary customer contacts, and deliver greater cost value.

According to officials, the 'Customer Service Excellence' initiative will hopefully lead to a significant expansion in the Council's customer services operation.

 

In the first stage of this expansion, completed in August 2009, Council Tax enquiries, along with Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefits, were moved into the Council's centralized customer service center which has already been handling environmental services and general council inquiries.

Since the opening of the Richmond Council customer service center in 2005, the Council has focused heavily on service quality improvement and officials said the expansion sees the service center grow to 30 full time equivalent personnel - a 24 percent increase.

 

In December 2008, Richmond became one of very few U.K. councils to achieve contact center quality accreditation under both the prestigious Customer Contact Association Global Standard and the Customer Service Excellence standard.

According to Dawn Cooper, head of customer services, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, specialist contact center technology has played a key role in improved telephone-based contact center performance.

"When we started operating the contact center, we soon realized that we needed specialist call handling technology to move service performance to the next level."

“The use of advanced contact centre technology has made a huge difference to improving customer satisfaction, advisor performance, call quality and first call resolution,” Cooper said.