A report to a council committee meeting next week praises the progress made in improving customer reception facilities. 94% of users says they are satisfied with the contact centre, an improvement on previous years.
The time taken to answer telephone calls (they had 244,277 last year) has improved while the number of residents visiting the West Offices offices has fallen from 141,556 to 112,893. Visitors wait on average for 7.2 minutes.
Business visitor numbers have also reduced.
The Council say this change is due to more people using “on line” and “auto payment” systems. These systems are cheaper for the authority to operate and should be available 24/7.
But the experience of those using “on line” services is very mixed.
The report says, “From October 2016 residents have been encouraged to complete certain transactions online. As an example – since November – 2,454 street light and street cleansing issues were reported with 1,315 (55%) of these now being logged by residents online”.
However, these are pretty much the only issues that you can report “on line” with an expectation that you will actually get a response.
The roll out of issue reporting on other services has stalled.
For the third year in a row the Council has been unable to say how long it takes to deal with electronic communications nor does the report say what customer satisfaction levels are with this contact channel.
Sooner or later the Council will have to come clean on why some of its web based customer contact systems are such a shambles.