Islington Council, Centrix and Avaya collaborate to create
Contact Islington
Case Study

Islington Council serves a borough in the centre of London just north of the City of London. The borough has a population of some 179,000 residents. Contact Islington, the borough's new contact centre platform, was created in October 2003. The National Audit Commission describes Islington as "...the fastest improving local authority in the country, rising from a poor rating in 2002 to a good rating in 2004..." Contact Islington played a significant role in this achievement. Ý

Introduction

In 2003, Islington Council decided to review its customer contact strategy, integrating the council's contact centres into a single, seamless organisation, to be known as Contact Islington. The council wanted to significantly improve its customer service. The council was also keen to increase its organisational effectiveness through the creation of CI, putting skilled staff in place with the right tools at their disposal in order to dramatically improve the quality of service offered to customers as well as enabling cost-savings.

Contact Islington

Following a two-year strategic review and planning process, which had to take into account the imminent 2005 e-government deadline as well as the council's own requirements, CI opened on the 21 st October 2003 as a single point of contact for Islington residents to access a range of council services within the borough. CI was designed using leading-edge contact centre technology, at the heart of which was Avaya's Definity contact centre platform, integrated with Altitude uCI (Unified Customer Interaction) to route traffic and monitor the various channels operated by the council - from voice contact through to email, fax and face-to-face queuing within the CI building itself. The robust, scaleable nature of the Avaya solution was a key factor in its selection, enabling CI to develop its communications platform over time as new products and services are added. In addition, CI opted for a VoIP environment, as Councillor George Allan, who is responsible for CI, notes: "...you couldn't really build a contact centre in 2003 that isn't IP-ready".

CI in action

At go-live, CI's 40 staff were handling 23,000 calls each week, a figure which fell to 17,000 calls within 6 weeks. Four months after the creation of CI, the contact centre was handling between 9 and 10,000 calls per week. Ý Answering times are now 20 seconds or less for 98-99% of calls, and CI is now a stable contact centre environment, with a very low call abandonment rate. Even the seasonal peak in April, where councils across the country are typically at their busiest, showed no increase in the first year of CI's operation. Ý

Kevin Gibbs, Head of Contact Islington explains:
"Our aim is to use as little technology between us and our customers as possible, but with world-class technology in the background to support and enhance the service delivery. Our customers like the fact that they can usually get straight through to us - that's a real USP for us. We've noticed a significant improvement in our reputation for customer service - 60-70% of our calls are now resolved first time."

Call clipping

Following the contact centre's launch, it became apparent that there was a challenge relating to 'call clipping' - although most customers were being answered first time, around 20-30 customers a day were being 'clipped' i.e. cut off. As CI aims to be 'one call sensitive' - treating every call as absolutely critical - CI asked Centrix to work with them to address the issue. Centrix's partnership approach was crucial to resolving the problem, working with CI for a year to stop the clipping from occurring. Softphones were replaced with IP handsets and the Altitude was reconfigured to overcome the problem.

Kevin Gibbs continued:
"It's only when issues such as call clipping arise that one can really see how strong our supplier relationships are. In the public sector, we tend to spend a long time planning and a very short time delivering on the plans. Our transition from softphone to hardphone, for instance, was given a window of just 7 days to complete. Centrix worked around the clock to help us achieve this incredibly challenging timescale."

Gold command

Beyond dealing with the day-to-day issues of the borough, Contact Islington also takes on an important role in crisis situations, becoming the control room for the borough. The flow of information is clearly crucial in emergencies and CI's 'one call sensitive' policy becomes even more vital. On the day of the terrorist bombings in London, the control room was activated in 10 minutes, setting up a command centre within CI's bullet-proof control room. On 7 th July 2005, when a series of terrorist attacks was carried out across London, Islington took on Gold Command centre status, part of a network assuming control for coordinating all of London's boroughs.

As Kevin Gibbs explains:
"On the day of the attacks, we needed to deploy quickly, using pre-tested equipment to ensure we were running at optimum capacity. Centrix's work with us in developing the contact centre to handle this kind of pressurised situation was critical to our role in London at this challenging time."

New developments

CI is an evolving contact centre, which typically launches a new service every 3-6 months. In March 2004, CI took over the corporate insurance service for the borough, becoming in effect the claims handler for any council-related insurance claims. It also took on the out-of-hours community alarm services. Then in July 2004, CI assumed responsibility for the borough's corporate cash handling services, becoming, in effect, 'Islington's bank'. All council banking services are now handled by CI. As these new elements are brought into CI's sphere of influence, each must retain its own character and specialisations while blending into the general look, feel and sound of the CI operation, to ensure consistent quality of service for the end-user.

Kevin Gibbs comments:
"We have a good relationship with Centrix. CI is a high-performance contact centre which is flexible and scaleable enough to add new services and platforms as and when we are ready to do so. We've improved our reputation with our customers, we're running a flexible and responsive service and we're meeting our cost-saving targets. We've actually reduced the number of agents we require from 40 down to 32, while maintaining service standards. We expect to increase our agent numbers again to around 70 by the end of 2005 to deliver a wider range of services."

The future of CI

CI continues to evolve, with 80% of council services set to be delivered through CI 2006/7. CI's ambition is for any transaction or request for information by a customer to be delivered promptly by CI in a completely channel-independent manner. Going forward CI will integrate the Altitude platform with its CRM solution to enable a seamless offering to customers, which will also link with the council's physical advice centre in Islington. So, if the face-to-face aspect of the council's operations is very busy, the multi-skilled contact centre agents can be instantly deployed to deal with customers in person. This, in George Allan's words, represents 'true convergence', offering a total view of the customer service environment.

Ian Calder, Centrix's sales director, concludes:
"The Contact Islington programme is a good example of our approach to working in partnership with our customers, rather than just treating them as a 'sale'. Our onsite engineer, Matt Sicklen, has been with CI for nearly two years now, and we believe that the challenging work we've delivered with the means CI is confident we can help them to achieve their goals in future."

The Centrix/Avaya solution was recently nominated "Government solution of the year" by trade magazine Comms Business.

...ends...

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Contacts and further information

About Contact Islington

Contacts Nicola Quinn/Charles Dean

About Centrix

Based in Winchfield, Hampshire and Central London Centrix delivers converged voice, data and IP solutions to European businesses.

Through partnerships with global companies such as Avaya, Cisco, Energis, MCI, NetScreen and Braxtel and as a service provider for BT Wholesale, we have the resource, knowledge, and inhouse expertise, to design a tailored solution coupled with our bespoke installation, training and maintenance service.

From relatively simple ISDN-based PBXs to IP-based corporate networks, our knowledge in the convergence of voice and data puts us in the unique position of being able to discuss, design and implement the solution from the initial planning to the on-going support after the installation.

Contact Ian Calder ian.calder@centrix-uk.comÝ

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