Customer services team answer thousands of extra phone calls
STAFF working in customers services at Bridgend County Borough Council have taken almost 12,000 more telephone calls during the past couple of months than they did last year for the same period.
In total, the team who are all working from home, have answered 28,710 calls since lockdown, dealing with 6,300 emails and hundreds of requests for information on social media.
With a further 3,300 interactions via the council’s chatbot which launched last summer the total number of interactions has reached 40,000.
In the same period last year, the total number of telephone calls taken was 16,901.
Since the end of March, the team has taken on a raft of additional responsibilities ranging from assessing and organising the delivery of food parcels for residents who are shielding to liaising with the voluntary sector to ensure other means of support is provided such as prescription deliveries, wellbeing checks and inhouse care.
With the local authority providing around 800 separate services and residents no longer able to walk into the civic offices, a new telephone system was set up to enable calls to be answered as quickly as possible by routing to the correct service area.
The team, which includes the community support unit, has continued to provide its out of hours service, dealing with residents’ calls and emails, and monitoring CCTV and reporting any suspicious activities to the police.
To help meet the extra demand, four staff have been redeployed from other areas boosting the team to 32.
Council leader Huw David said: “With more than 5,000 residents receiving shielding letters from the Welsh Government and being advised to call our customer services if they required help and support, staff had to quickly adapt and ensure the correct processes were in place.
“It has been a monumental effort by the entire team who despite a radical change to their way of working have continued to ensure residents are still looked after throughout the day and night.
“In addition to taking on extra duties such as liaising with Welsh Government and the company responsible for delivering food parcels to residents, being trained on a new system and script and, in some cases, assisting other services while they were being set-up for homeworking, the team has continued to take calls on all its usual areas such as council tax, blue badges, highways and pest control.
“For many this has been while juggling childcare at home.”