Revenues & Benefits Department

Low-cost - High Impact Revenues & Benefits
Self Service Support Modules

The Challenges

• High customer contact activity within your department / Contact Centre generated, for example, by Annual Billing and Council Tax recovery action invariably swamps live enquiry-handling personnel. No set up, however professional can be expected to cope with such peak demands. whether it be a Contact Centre or the Back Office! Long queues; abandonment rates; backlogs and complaints can rapidly build up!
• Most large organisations e.g. Banks, Insurance and Utility Companies etc. now use automated services to provide 24 hour service… but very few Councils do (less than 2%). Your website carries a simple message - help yourself to information as often and at whatever time is most convenient to you, but most customers still prefer to use the telephone - so why not offer them the same flexibility?
• There is a growing acceptance of automated self-help services and a recognition that they are often the only viable way of after hours service. Inviting customers to help themselves to / provide information is a far better alternative to waiting in a long queue, leaving a message or offering no service at all.

The Solution

• Offer residents the OPTION of using a 24-hour telephone and email service that enables them to HELP THEMSELVES to information and advice (whilst drastically reducing the number of simple, repetitive enquiries reaching your skilled staff) You've just solved the resource problem whilst IMPROVING customer service - at a fraction of the cost of recruiting and training extra staff.
• From only £80 a day Self Service will answer an unlimited number of telephone calls and emails and provide residents with instant, consistently accurate information 24/7/365. So it's also a permanent solution to providing an after hours service and hitting performance / egovt / best value targets.
• Self Service can quickly identify vulnerable customers or complex enquiries and seamlessly transfer these callers to your live team during your opening hours.
• This is not hardware or software - it's a complete off site solution that you can plug in and use whenever it's needed - without any compatibility issues with existing or proposed systems. And because we provide both the content and the mechanics of the service, it only requires the minimum input from your staff / IT dept.
• If, like many councils, you are developing a departmental or corporate contact centre, Self Service will seamlessly integrate with and support your resources to provide a complete 24-hour service. Having answered over 15 million public sector enquiries, we feel qualified to talk to you on your own terms - we know this business.
• Self Service can be of equal benefit to all local authority departments and in addition to Revenue and Benefit enquiries, a growing range of Local Authorities is successfully using Self Service to answer Environmental, Planning, Housing, Recruitment and many other type of enquiries.

The Set Up - Simple & Quick

"Implementing Self Service was swift and easy - we were up and running with a fully customised service inside 4 weeks without a piece of hardware or software in sight… Customers can receive instant answers to most of their enquiries 24 hours a day however they choose to contact us… Self Service is well into the third year of service and has now successfully answered over 1 million calls and 120,000 emails, freeing up our staff to deal with more difficult enquiries and improve work clearance times"