Whitehall is in the dark over the performance of its call centres, with poor monitoring threatening to undermine the quality of service offered, a report by Parliament's Public Accounts Committee has found The report says that the Office of the e-Envoy, which is responsible for the Whitehall's call centre strategy as part of the wider e-government programme, has "limited information" on how well they run and the standard of service achieved. It also says that departments "lack sufficiently complete information on the full cost and time it takes to deal with calls".
It is important that departments understand the "likely volume and incidence of calls" so that they can provide a "prompt and reliable" service, the report says.
The Government has over 130 call centres which handle 95m telephone calls a year from people who wish to obtain information or advice, or to purchase services. The centres cost just over £350m a year to run and employ 15,000 staff.
"Existing quality of service measures tend to focus on the speed with which calls are answered and whether the enquiry was handled courteously. To obtain a more reliable assessment of service quality departments should also monitor and assess the extent to which advice provided was accurate and complete," says the report issued on 6 June 2003.
Edward Leigh, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee singled out the Child Benefit call centre as a poor performer and said improvements are needed.
"It is often more convenient for the public to obtain government services through call centres and the number of telephone calls has increased by 40% over the last three years. Departments must make sure that call centres can handle demand so that customers are not frustrated by the line being constantly engaged, as happened to an astonishing five million calls to the Child Benefit Centre in 2001–02. But providing a good service is not just about the speed with which calls are answered, and Departments should assess the accuracy of the advice provided."
Quelle: Kablenet
