Lambeth Council Achieves Workforce Optimization with NICE

If you're as unfamiliar with London city governance as we are, you probably didn't know - either - that the London Borough of Lambeth Council is one of 14 local authorities that make up inner London, or that it's one of the most densely populated boroughs of inner London.

Lambeth Service Center, based at Olive Morris House, employs 120 agents and staff to manage more than 1.3 million inbound telephone calls each year, as they provide services for the council including signposting, information provision and service delivery for telephone enquiries that relate to environmental services, housing supply and demand, among others.

The LSC decided to look at how they could continue to improve the quality of service to customers. Allan Drew, dvisional director for Customer Services at the Finance & Resources Department of Lambeth Council, said, "a customer may be seeking unnecessary clarification, progress chasing, asking for reassurance, or another form of unnecessary service delivery follow up," among other avoidable contacts.

So they turned to the NICE SmartCenter, "specifically for its interaction analytics technology," Drew noted, adding that it "was a partner of BT (News - Alert), which provides the Lambeth Council's telephony system."

And things seem to have worked out: The introduction of NICE SmartCenter, NICE officials say, "has enabled the LSC to capture accurate information to explain why customers call, how many interactions are avoidable and begin to understand the true nature of all its customer contacts."

A typical example of such customer insight relates to calls about vehicle parking, where the LSC has been able to capture all inbound calls, identify those concerning parking and review the reason for the customer enquiry. As Drew says, "Early analysis of these insights pinpointed parking permits and broken meters as significant reasons for contact."

By using interaction analytics, LSC is able to create search parameters to "listen" automatically for words and phrases that may typically be used by customers during an avoidable contact, such as "parking fine" or "I called last week."

Interaction analytics is also playing a pivotal role in the quality monitoring of agents at the LSC, Drew says, adding that although use of NICE SmartCenter is still in its infancy at the LSC, "it has already delivered significant benefits to Lambeth Council, better enabling it to understand the type and quality of customer interactions taking place and making a valuable contribution in upholding the council's customer mission statement."