Brisbane City Council is now the very model of public sector accessibility, but it wasn't always that way. In the late 1990s someone decided to audit the number of entries in the telephone directory for Brisbane City Council. There were 640 separate numbers, and this reflected the fragmented reality of accessing multiple services from a single council. Residents were frustrated, and behind the scenes coucil departments were faced with difficulty when it came to sharing information and working together. Something had to give.
"Back then people were being bounced around half a dozen times whenever they tried to make an enquiry by phone," says Jude Munro, CEO of Brisbane City Council. "We decided that one point of contact by phone was the way to go."
Jude Munro's priority as Chief Executive Officer of the Brisbane City Council is to help shape Brisbane's future through leading the Council in meeting and exceeding expectations as a top-class organisation. Her vision is for Brisbane to become not only the most livable city in the Asia Pacific Region, but a world-class metropolis.
Munro is no stranger to civic management - she is the first person in Australia to be CEO of two of Australia's capital city councils. From 1997-2000 she was CEO of the City of Adelaide, and she has been interim CEO of the City of Moreland in Victoria and CEO of the City of St Kilda.
Still, the task of establishing a call centre that could embrace the breadth of the city council's activities, with the depth of knowledge required to satisfy needy citizens proved to be complex.
The call centre, once established, had its service remit increased incrementally month-on-month, until the entire range of civic services were covered. Currently just over 200 staff handle and average of 7000 calls a day - with enquiries ranging from water charges, to local bus timetables to library book lending.
Overall the call centre has more than 5000 distinct enquiry areas, but instead of trawling through the phonebook, Brisbane's population now only needs to dial one number - and 98 per cent of calls are able to be answered at first contact.
Following the success of the call centre, Munro is currently looking to migrate customer service delivery across less expensive communication channels. The business case is compelling: each call to the call centre costs Brisbane City Council in the region of US$4.50. To serve the same enquiries through web self-service costs less than 1 per cent of this.
"I believe that written correspondence is diminishing, and we're getting emails as an alternative," says Munro. "We have followed this through by establishing a Brisbane 'mega portal' that covers not just government-to-citizen services, but also community groups in broader Brisbane."
As a result of this e-Brisbane strategy, the council now manages more than a third of its interactions online.
"Brisbane City Council is the largest council in Australia. We are a very large public sector entity, and we take our responsibilities for managing Brisbane and delivering our service responsibilities very seriously," Munro adds. "We've won national and state customer service awards for our call centre. We're very proud of the work it does."
With a 94 per cent customer satisfaction rating measured across a range of indicators, from responsiveness, to politeness, to accuracy of information - there is no disputing the success of the council's approach to public sector service delivery: "My whole management team is committed to this strategy, and we really try to recruit the best people - not just the cheapest people - into our call centre."
Staff turnover is generally less than 10 per cent, which compares with a national average of 28 per cent.
As Brisbane continues to reinvent the civic relationship with new service offerings, it is looking to consistently exceed the service standards of the private sector. In part this is a defence mechanism - it keeps the outsourcing option at arms length. However Munro also believes that the call centre could also be a nice little earner for the council: "We could find that because of the style of the contact centre that we operate we will take on other business outside of Brisbane City Council. The future of public sector service delivery is very interesting!"
Autor: Edmund Tan
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 14.07.2004
