The deadline for receipt of public questions is 23:59 on Wednesday, 16 March 2022.
The Council’s scheme for public speaking at committee meetings may be inspected here:
a) From Mr. Daniel Fulton
Does the Leader of the Council support the political principle of the separation of powers, and if so, can the Leader please explain why there are no meetings of the Civic Affairs or Employment Committees scheduled before the Local Election?
b) From Dr. Douglas de Lacey
My concern is primarily, but not exclusively, with the performance of the Contact Centre (page 31 of Council's agenda). As I often commented when with you, there may be little problem if we miss the target for all of our callers by only a few seconds; though the target itself entails a very long wait of 90 seconds. But there could be a real problem if missing the target means that some callers are left on hold interminably. And when the *average* is 500 seconds -- over 8 minutes! -- as it seems to have been in May 2021, it's hardly surprising that an awful lot of calls are dropped; though there is nothing here to tell us how many that is. Before I resigned from the Council, I was assured that new software would ensure that proper statistical analysis would be provided on KPIs, including geeky things like means and standard deviations. Now nearly a year on we are still presented with the almost meaningless graphs we always had. I do not criticise your overworked officers, but I don't see how you can properly understand the situation absent real data. When will full details be presented in the KPI reports?
Minutes:
Two questions were received ahead of the meeting.
a) From Mr. Daniel Fulton
Councillor Bridget Smith, Leader of the Council, noted that Mr. Fulton was not in attendance and said a written response would be supplied.
b) From Dr. Douglas de Lacey
The Leader invited Dr. Douglas de Lacey to ask his question:
My concern is primarily, but not exclusively, with the performance of the Contact Centre (page 31 of Council's agenda). As I often commented when with you, there may be little problem if we miss the target for all of our callers by only a few seconds, though the target itself entails a very long wait of 90 seconds. But there could be a real problem if missing the target means that some callers are left on hold interminably. And when the *average* is 500 seconds -- over 8 minutes! -- as it seems to have been in May 2021, it's hardly surprising that an awful lot of calls are dropped; though there is nothing here to tell us how many that is. Before I resigned from the Council, I was assured that new software would ensure that proper statistical analysis would be provided on KPIs, including geeky things like means and standard deviations. Now nearly a year on we are still presented with the almost meaningless graphs we always had. I do not criticise your overworked officers, but I don't see how you can properly understand the situation absent real data. When will full details be presented in the KPI reports?
Councillor Neil Gough, the Deputy Leader responded:
The basic average call wait time is down to just 32 seconds in December 2021.
The new telephony system does give the Council the ability to monitor wait times with additional granularity to analyse the situation. We have for example looked at the simple relationship between calls received per day and average wait times, the call centre can cope with a rate of calls in the range of 600-700 per day but then beyond that call times increase dramatically as the rate of calls being added exceeds those being dealt with. These insights are more helpful than monthly data whether that is of average call times or even standard deviations that obscure very different experiences over different days.
A new system has been implemented to address the frustration of the long wait. The call back service is the most significant of these that has been operating since November.
The call back kicks in at five minutes and stops the long tailback that you are concerned about. Even in December, there were 118 call backs requested when the wait time was only 32 seconds.
The Council will publish from April the following data: the percentage of calls that wait for more than five minutes; and what percentage of those calls request a call back service. This will highlight the long wait issue and the effectiveness of our callback service in serving those residents.
The Leader invited Dr. de Lacey to ask a supplementary question.
Dr. Douglas de Lacey was supportive of the progress being made by the contact centre but raised concern of the lack of figures in the performance report in addition to the percentages.
The Deputy Leader thanked Dr. de Lacey for the suggestion, and said he would discuss this with the Head of Transformation, HR and Corporate Services to ensure this would be implemented.