Kent County Council implemented Teams in 2020, and although it worked well for internal communication and collaboration, it become clear an enhanced feature set was required for customer contact. After evaluating several solutions, Resonate, in partnership with Cantium, Kent County Council’s IT provider, integrated the Luware Contact Centre into Teams for their pensions department. This pilot aimed to establish a benchmark for other departments requiring advanced customer contact solutions.
Challenges
Rather than maintaining a traditional ‘call centre and back office’ structure, the pensions department have expertise in all aspects of pensions with each team member handling customer calls. When Kent County Council initially migrated to Teams, several vendors were evaluated for contact centre solutions before it was decided to manage with the native features within Teams.
However, the feature set and flexibility required in an environment when all team members had to spend time on the phone, was not sufficient to the extent that they were looking at options that could mean moving away from Teams. Caroline Howick, Team Manager of Pensions explains:
“We bring people in and train them up from the ground. We just had one phone number one phone line. We had people logging into that phone line and they could literally be getting a phone call about anything”
The pensions team had a relatively high turnover, and a wide variation in skills. All employees took calls as part of their role, this meant that less experienced staff were nervous to take calls they couldn’t deal with, In addition, the analytics were cumbersome to dig into so team managers did not have the business intelligence to understand the volume and type of calls that were coming through to make improvements. As a result, call abandon and transfer levels were high and customer service was perceived as poor. In fact, the abandon rate on calls for the team was 33%.
“We’d been trying to monitor what sort of calls we were getting by handing out spreadsheets … people would forget to do it and you never got anything useful out of it. And when I was looking at the limited stats that we could get through under our previous phone system, we discovered we were missing over a third of calls”
Solution
Recognising the need for a better solution, Cantium collaborated with Resonate to identify a Teams-integrated contact centre solution that would support Kent County Council’s needs across all departments making customer contact. If successful, the solution delivered for the pensions department would be rolled out council-wide. Some initial solutions considered were “outside Teams,” but Cantium and Resonate identified that a Teams-embedded solution would streamline training and enhance usability across the Council. Caroline notes:
“it just works… we’ve not got to retrain our team on how to answer the phones because you’re still picking up a Team’s call in the same way you pick up any other Team’s call”
Cantium provided project management, engagement, and analysis to ensure the solution met both the Council’s and the department’s needs. After reviewing options, the Luware Teams Contact Centre, which provides deep integration with Teams, was selected for the team of 60 and deployed by Resonate architects. The Luware solution was chosen as it fully integrated with Teams while providing the functionalities that Kent County Council were missing, such as simple drag and drop workflows, dynamic ‘manager operated’ menu systems for self-service calls, skills-based routing and easy to access real-time reporting
“There were quite a few things that we got quite excited about. It looked easy to use, especially for our team who aren’t contact centre experts, but rather an admin team that needs to manage customer contact – I was easily able to set up all the workflows by simply dragging and dropping not to mention all the reporting and information that we could get”
Results
The results have been transformative, with the increased visibility of calls and ability to ‘self-manage’ customer contact, freeing up the IT team and enabling operational improvement The operational team achieved the following improvements:
- achieving a massive 44% improvement in call answering stats – 95% of calls are now being answered with an average queue time of just 30 seconds.
- enabling call routing to the right person with the correct skill levels, massively reducing transfers and improving 1st touch resolution and customer and employee experience.
- effectively managing peaks and troughs in workload, and planning and reacting to events
- driving continued improvement in processes, and better utilisation of skilled staff though easy access to information
- benefiting from improved collaboration, on Microsoft Teams, from employees working fully within Teams with the tools they need
The design and deployment of the Luware Teams Contact Centre solution by Resonate’s architects, plus Cantium’s project management and support in ensuring a smooth rollout during a high-demand period. was key to its success and the hypercare team came in for praise from Caroline.
“They were absolutely brilliant and were on it straight away if we had an issue or a question or we weren’t sure if something wasn’t quite working, any issues were sorted really quickly and say the whole the whole thing has just been a really positive experience”
Due to the success in the pension’s department, Resonate is now rolling out Teams Contact Centre across the council, with more than 300 Luware licences active and counting.
“Working with the Resonate team has been brilliant and the Luware software is easy to use. We are really pleased with the solution, it does everything we need and much more than we thought. It’s opened our eyes to what we can do and see and analyse to make things better for our customers and for our team”
Caroline Howick Team Manager – Pensions, Kent County Council
