Welsh Borough Council – an SMS solution Case Study

This case study outlines the challenges that large inbound call volumes created for a Borough Council in Wales and shows how virtual operator technology enabled them to reduce their operating costs; providing a valued contribution towards overall cost reduction targets.

The bigger cost saving picture

Automated call handling is part of a much larger, Government led, cost-reduction and redundancy puzzle which is being pieced together in every corner of the public sector to identify areas where savings can be made.

Faced with this inevitability, Managers have to decide how they are going to deliver public services to the current standards with less staff. Factor-in the ever-increasing expectations from stakeholders that service levels will continue to improve, and the challenge becomes ever more daunting.

Lowering the cost of call centre delivery

Welsh Borough CouncilTraditionally, contact centre agents do not add any business value to the call routing process. However, accurate call routing is an essential part of customer service, so it must always be sufficiently resourced.

Switching from a manually operated call centre, which is labour intensive, to a technology-driven, voice automated one, will enable you to remove agents from front line contact centre roles and lower the cost of delivering this service, without compromising the customer experience.

However, for this Welsh Council, key considerations when assessing a voice activated solution went beyond just reducing their annual operator costs. The solution had to integrate with their existing Avaya telephony system – there was no budget to ‘rip and replace’.

It needed to seamlessly handle all internal calls (which equates to 60% of all inbound calls) and improve efficiency … but most importantly, the Council is signed up to the Welsh Language Scheme, (a scheme which states that public services must be available in both English and Welsh), so it needed to ‘speak’ Welsh.

Our Automated Call Handling System Speaks Welsh

ProcessFlows Multilingual Virtual operator is an auto attendant software solution. It has been seamlessly integrated by ProcessFlows with the Council’s Avaya system to provide a ‘virtual operator’ which answers all inbound calls (internal and external) and gives callers the option to proceed in either English or Welsh.

The attendant copes with any peak call volumes and automatically prompts and routes callers to the most appropriate person or department. If the ‘call attendant’ can’t get the caller through, callers have the choice to be re-routed to another contact or leave a message.

At-a-glance benefits

• Reduces routine call-answering staff overhead
• Frees-up those staff to tackle more complex tasks and focus on the public who need personalised support
• Integrates with all incumbent telephony systems
• Welsh language training is no longer required for reception staff as the virtual operator understands Welsh
• Very quick return on investment (ROI) and significant year on year savings
• Easy to expand to include Voicemail for all staff across all locations.

“Andy Whiteside, ProcessFlows UC Manager, worked with the Welsh Council throughout the transition process. Andy said “Feedback is very positive. The solution is delivering a high first-call resolution rate and both customer and staff satisfaction rates are positive. Being able to prompt callers in Welsh gave the ProcessFlows solution a unique advantage over other virtual operator technologies.”