OnDemand enables Stockport to cope with seasonal call surge

Civica’s contact centre boosts Stockport’s telephone capacity at the busiest time of the year

Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council has been utilising Civica’s OnDemand service for around five years to help with, amongst other things, revenues and benefits back office work. In early 2016, as it prepared to send out annual council tax bills, the Council recognised that its call centre was short staffed and would struggle to cope with the likely increase in phone calls from residents.

So, having already used Civica’s highly-trained contact centre staff the previous year to supplement their own resources, Stockport once again called on the OnDemand service to handle overflow calls during the busy council tax billing period.

Seamless handling of high call volumes prevented disruption to Stockport’s customer service

• Service set up quickly with staff trained on the Council’s specific systems
• Provided staff with expertise in council tax
• Civica team handled around 550 calls per week with an average response time of eight seconds
• High quality of service delivered to the Council’s customers
• Flexibility offered peace of mind for senior council staff
• Provided assurance that the Council’s contact centre could deal with the seasonal surge in demand

OnDemand is a really good service – it was just like having more people on my team. I was able to give them the level of discretion I give my own staff who I’ve known for years. They worked hard with customers who can be difficult. It’s all very well talking cost, what IT systems you use and so on, but when customers are difficult it’s about the quality of the service delivered.”
Sharon Basing, Team Manager, Stockport Direct.

Read more