During UK Lockdown, Council Continues to Assist Residents with Queries about Essential Services, While Keeping Staff Safe
8×8, Inc., a leading integrated cloud communications platform provider, announced the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham selected 8×8 Contact Centre to transition the council’s entire contact centre to the cloud in just two weeks to enable remote work.
Barking and Dagenham Council provides essential services to more than 210,000 residents of the borough. A team of 55 contact centre agents handle approximately 40,000 calls each month, addressing a range of queries from waste and recycling collection, to council tax, planning applications, social care services and housing repairs.
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In light of the COVID-19 outbreak and the UK Government’s mandate to work from home where possible, the council understood that it needed to take swift action to protect its contact centre staff while keeping vital services running for its residents. It realised its legacy, on-premises contact centre system was unable to handle the required shift to work from home.
The council selected 8×8 Contact Centre to rapidly transition its entire contact centre operation onto the cloud platform. In just two weeks, Barking and Dagenham Council had migrated all of its office-based agents to a remote work set up.
Thanks to the intuitive nature of 8×8 Contact Centre, in just one week and despite the radical change in working practices, council agents have exceeded normal service levels. The council has also reported productivity improvements as it provides these agents, all considered essential workers, with the ability to self-isolate without service disruption.
The first stage of rollout was designed to keep services running as usual. In the coming weeks, the council will deploy a number of advanced features including Interactive Voice Response, secure payment card processing, and the use of chatbot functionality to automate responses to simple queries initiated on the council website.
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Councillor Dominic Twomey, the Council’s Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Finance, Performance and Core Services, said “The safety of our staff is of the utmost importance so we knew it was vital to find a technology solution that could allow our contact centre agents to work from home whilst also keeping vital customer services running for the local community. 8×8 has been the perfect partner to support us in challenging circumstances, with the entire team working hard to move our contact centre operations to the cloud in a matter of days.”
“We understand how important it is for councils to keep in touch with the community during these unprecedented times,” said Russell Tilsed, Sales Director, Public Sector at 8×8. “Our dedicated team of public sector experts are proud to have been able to transition Barking and Dagenham Council contact centre onto our cloud platform in just two weeks. We’re looking forward to working together to enhance service levels even further in the coming weeks.”
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