Council plans online customer care portal
A NEW council online portal allowing residents to pay charges, request bins and report problems is under development.
The web tool will be launched later this year by Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council to speed up services.
The system links existing online forms with the authority’s backroom customer relationship management (CRM) operations.
While residents can already access online requests the new portal will let them to open up their own account to deal directly with the council as well as viewing personal information, such as recent transactions or rent balances.
The move is intended to improve efficiency levels for the council as well as enhance customer experience. A report updating members of the finance, performance and scrutiny committee said: “A new CRM system is currently being implemented as part of the first phase of the ‘MyAccount’ project - the second phase being the launch of a web based customer portal for customers to self-serve, requesting services such as council tax changes, viewing rent balances and reporting a missed bin.
“Ongoing improvements to the way we work are resulting in more and more services being made increasing accessible to customers while at the same time still providing excellent services to customers who prefer to contact us via phone or face to face.”
The new CRM system will go live in June 2017 with the customer web portal going live late 2017.
Council chiefs hope the online option will relieve pressure on phone and face-to-face enquiry teams who have experienced unprecedented demand over the last 14 months.
This has been due largely to the garden waste charge which was introduced last year. At times the council switchboard was so swamped with calls advisers could not cope.
March 2016 saw a huge spike last- ing through April, May and June thanks to repeated calls by customers and a high level of enquiries.
Last summer the number of people not getting through started to decrease but was still above target. The report says new staff starters and continuing queries over garden waste as well as the EU referendum led to an increase in average call length impacting on people ringing off.
Despite targets not being met, an official satisfaction survey, comparing council customer-facing services, put Hinckley and Bosworth above both other district and unitary authority rivals.
Actions have since been taken to try and resolve problems during peak contact periods including limiting holidays, using temps and specialised agency staff, offering call backs to customers after 5pm for those who don’t want to wait, and when it’s quiet getting front desk advisers to log into the phone system and support the telephone queue.