Issue - meetings

As detailed in the recommendation.

                        Councillor Mullin introduced the Digital Customer Overview report which provided details on the creation of a single contact centre for the Council.

                        The key principles in the design of a combined contact centre team were:

·         To increase resilience within the team to cope with absence and allow resources to be more effectively targeted when incidents which generated high contract volumes occurred;

·         To increase Welsh language provision within the team;

·         To provide customers and citizens with the choice to access information and services easily online; and

·         To provide customers and citizens with the ability to access multiple services via their Customer Account in a user-friendly and intuitive way as more services moved into the contact centre.

The Chief Officer (Governance) explained that three posts had recently been appointed to for the project, which were Digital Customer and Community Resilience Programme Manager, Customer Transaction Officers, and Income and Marketing Programme Manager.

Go live for phase 1 was planned for mid-March 2019, but Chief Officers would review the technical and staff readiness position one month in advance to make the final decision about whether to proceed at that time.  This would ensure that they had confidence that services would be delivered with no degradation of quality as a result of the move.

Councillor Thomas said the new IT software had experienced recent problems with it not being operational on three occasions.  The Chief Officer (Governance) explained that the software company had been taken over by a larger company and the Council had been required to use a different product at short notice.  The back-up system of that software had not been installed which had resulted in the incidents referred to by Councillor Thomas.  This had now been rectified and he provided assurance that regular testing would be carried out between the main system and the back-up system.

In response to a request from Councillor Thomas that Streetscene contact centre staff be involved in the Programme Board, the Chief Officer (Governance) said that would take place, along with contact centre staff from housing also being involved.  He also suggested that as the relevant Cabinet Members, Councillors Attridge and Thomas, also be part of that process.

On a further question about Invest to Save, the Chief Officer (Governance) provided assurance that the aim of the Digital Strategy was to see a reduction in call volumes.  Until that was evident resources would remain the same.

Councillor Thomas also said that when the introduction of garden waste charges was introduced, 85/90% of residents opted to pay over the phone.  The Chief Executive said this was possibly due to it being a new charge but that figure should reduce as payments were renewed year on year.

In response to a comment from Councillor Roberts, the Chief Officer (Governance) said that the website needed to be worked on to ensure it was user friendly.  In addition, a new payment portal was in the process of being purchased which would take residents direct to payment options.

            RESOLVED:

That the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 258