Contact Centres - Do they work for Planning? - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

No No and thrice No We have a contact centre here at Stroud. When it went in, it started with Revs and Bens and then expanded over about a year. When it came to Planning (and BC) we started the FAQs and training, and quickly came to the conclusion that from a custommer point of view, we were building in failure demand (see John Seddon - Vanguard - Systems thinking). The advice required was based on so many constraints and assumptions, that the custommer service staff were giving out incorrect advice (not their fault) or taking a message, and passing it on. As a result, Planning agreed to provide on Business Support officer to deal with form filling and neighbours who wanted to see the digitised plans, and a duty planner/technician to answer THERE and THEN the questions such as "do i need planning permission" The ethos of systems thinking is deal with it properly the first time, then you arn't dealing with follow up calls, confusion and ultimately complaints (have you ever costed the end to end costs of a complaint... you should) If i can be of assistance to you, patrick, or others, please let me know. phil.skill@stroud.gov.uk

Patrick, As Phil will probably tell you, the first thing you need to know is your demand - that is, what enquiries are being made? Before we were submerged into Wiltshire, Kennet DC did have a call centre and we found that it was very successful at taking out a lot of routine enquiries. (What forms do I need; what is the progress of an application, where can I see the plans). Contact centre staff can be relatively easily trained to deal with these, especially if the plans and details of an application are available on the web that they can view and direct callers too if they want to see them. Where it is not so good is in dealing with the Do I need permission? questions, unless you did what we did and simply answer such telephone calls by sending out a standard form that could be completed with the dimensions etc on and then sent in - as we only deal with PD queries in writing anyway. The advantage of a contact centre to a Development Management Team is that it can remove a lot of routine calls that either your officers or admin team would have to deal with, freeing them up to deal with the applications. Of course, you can make life even better for yourselves if you try to cut out a lot of the calls in the first place, by putting the answers to some of the questions in your neighbour or acknowledgement letters. Ours direct people as the first point of contact to the web, where they can see the plans and follow the progress of the application, including consultation responses, without needing to contact us. Two cautionary notes - firstly, watch how much the corporate pot stings you for in your budget for the services; Secondly, having built up what was a pretty good service in advising people whether they needed permission (and whether they would get it) , like many other Councils, we will be likely to be stopping such free services in the forseeable future, and going down the Certificate of Lawfulness route/pointing to the planning portal and its interactive house.

Patrick, we have gone down this route from Jan this year. In brief, our front of house reception team moved to a corporate customer service centre, so the same people are answering the same calls, but in a different building and as part of a different service. The team did not deal with the technical enquiries, ie the does it need planning permission question either before or after, and we had prior to the change stopped a free ‘pd’ service. Biggest downside for us has been that the team also managed a drop in reception centre, which with the resource sitting elsewhere, has now been made appointment only, and our customers see this as a backward step. What made the change easier was that incoming phones calls and visits to our reception had been dropping over the last few years, and this is a factor of the increasing use of the internet to view plans and make comments and find information etc. Finally, and to echo Mikes first cautionary comment, this change did not save planning any money at the change over date.

They do for Kirklees, but the way it's done has to be meticulously thought through and preparation and training for call centre and planning staff needs to be really thorough before going live - from start to finish it took us around 6 months but it was worth it. Basically we split our calls between those that the call centre (Kirklees Direct, or KD) can deal with and those that they can't. Most routine calls and queries have a structured response that either gives the enquirer the info they need or tells them where to get it. 'Do I need planning permission' is dealt with by a referral to the Planning Portal if the caller has web access, and many happlily take this up once it's been signposted. This deals with around 60% of the calls. The rest are logged on a web based database that is checked regularly by planning support staff who either deal with it or pass on by re-allocation to the area / specialist teams within the application. Planners in each of the teams take it in turns to check their inbox (they all have their own) and deal with enquiries on the same day if possible. This means around 80% of all 'hand offs' from KD are dealt with inside 24 hours. KD take around 300/400 calls a week so the transfer of work is significant. Although we don't publicise case officers phone numbers, planning agents and applicants always have a direct line to the person dealing with their application (provided on the acknowledgement) so they don't have to go through KD. Similarly (and importantly) Councillors also have direct lines. We had a few complaints at the start of the process (and by this I mean perhaps half a dozen) but it settled down very quickly and although I have to agree it's probably not saving any money it's made a huge difference to the speed and quality of the general advice service we can provide.

The approach indicated by Eric is ideal. We've worked with services who have sought to put the 'difficult' calls into contact centers and as others above have indicated this can be very problematic so the split is likely to be right. Also the use of call backs is important here to get the balance between service levels and costs. Queue theory based models can show the impact of call reductions and resource needs and the simulations are likely to show that Eric's approach is close to the ideal as is realistic. Customer satisfaction results we have reviewed also support this model as being a good match between cost and need. But I wonder if Patrick's approach is not an even better 1st starting point. We've worked with a number of services and found that letter and website information is often failing to reduce demand through simple wording issues e.g. one site we looked at had language which when assessed with standard tools was way more complex than an editorial in The Telegraph. When we observed real users interacting with this (and also with the standard letters) we had highly educated individuals taking up to 20 minutes to find web information and they gave letters a rating of 1-2 out of 5 for clarity and usefulness! Putting these things right took 50% of calls away from planners (which was rather more than the previous attempt using contact centers which only reduced call volumes to planners by 45%..at a cost of many 10s of £k). Beware also of the 'hydra effect' where a headcount reduction is achieved in planning but another one appears in the contact centre.. and where this doesn't happen that the cost of script building, training, licences etc for contact centre staff isn't more than the extra productivity gains from the planners (and incidentally generalist contact centre staff are likely to take longer to answer the same question due to learning effects, set up time loading scripts etc so which needs to be offset against any assumed reduced salary costs) . Which takes me to the last issue, why do we want to put calls in the contact centre? If the business justification its not to reduce headcount by measurable productivity gains then what else is it for? We know customers prefer to speak to planners so service gains are unlikely (unless they can't reach planning staff) so this may be a questionable business justification. And if it is for planning productivity reasons are we sure there aren't other measures that will produce a better ROI? These aspects and others may be why we've started to see what appears to be a trend away from contact centre models as vehicles for cost saving .