AN Opposition councillor at Warrington has expressed concern at the time residents have to wait for an answer when they call the council’s contact centre by telephone.
Cllr Nigel Balding is calling for an improvement in the current waiting times which, he says, are increasing costs for the council and also leaving vulnerable residents exasperated.
The target wait time was five minutes, but the actual average wait was currently 10 minutes. This meant that some waits were longer. He had heard of waits of 18 minutes and 30 minutes and in one case Appleton councillor Mark Jervis had been forced to take the matter up with a council director when one resident could not make contact by telephone at all.
Part of the problem was a backlog in dealing with things like Council Tax enquiries. There had been delays of up to six months to process changes to Council tax.
“This must be causing increased demand on Contact Warrington as residents try to chase up a response from the council.”
Cllr Balding also criticised the council’s telephone system which gave inadequate feedback on when a call might be answered. In September, on a wait of 30 minutes, the system was playing a message that the council was experiencing a high demand but was employing more staff to clear the backlog.
More modern systems helped callers by indicating where their call was in a queue during periods of high demand.
Cllr Balding said he understood that the council had been “part of the war” against Covid-19 and was grateful to staff who had played a part in that. He understood that some had been re-deployed onto tasks like tracking and tracing and that perhaps this had led to longer average waiting times.
But he called for improvements, including in underlying issues such as processing Council Tax changes in a timely manner.
Cllr Tom Jennings, cabinet member for economic development and innovation, said the council’s contact centre supported a high number of vulnerable individuals.
“The objective therefore isn’t to get through as many calls as possible, as fast as possible, like other call centres. Rightly, our staff spend a longer time giving residents the care and attention they deserve to ensure they are fully supported.
“Through the Covid pandemic, contact centre staff have supported a much broader range of complex issues faced by our residents which understandably added to the waiting times. These staff deserve our praise for serving this town to the best of their ability, in an extremely challenging time.
“Our Target wait time for Contact Warrington is currently 300 seconds. Average wait time is currently falling below 600 seconds which is significantly lower than the 1070 seconds reported at the end of Quarter 4. Performance for September continues to show a steady improvement back to our target.”
