Having never been to the call centre before I was keen to see how it all worked and what happened when people were calling. Having only ever used a sales focused CRM it was great to see one designed around customer service in action.
Unfortunately they had no control over the calls coming in and the housing enquiries I was most interested in were few and far between the enquiries about bin collections. This did give me a change to see how the CRM linked with the knowledge base and the EDRMS and how the ideas we discuss in the Paving the Way meetings might work in practice.
If a caller wanted to report her bin not being emptied the staff were able to use her address to pull up the route she lived on and then the drivers notes for that route. These notes are produced by the collection teams and document any issues they have for example the road being blocked. Staff are then able to explain why it happened and what the caller can do.
It turned out that the service is getting even more sophisticated and the contact centre will soon have real time updates on the movements of the collection truck allowing them to provide even better customer service.
Seeing it all in action has given all of us loads of ideas about how we can make use of these systems in the future and we're all excited about what we can do in the future.
Thanks to Rachel for showing us round and to her and the staff for putting up with all our questions.
