Agenda item

Report to follow.

Cllr Seema Chandwani, Cabinet Member for Resident Services & Tackling Inequality, introduced the report for this item. She noted that Customer Services was a conduit to the Council’s main services and wished to acknowledge that it included some very hard-working frontline staff who were dealing with a range of difficult and diverse issues with a relentless level of demand.

Elaine Prado, Head of Customer Experience & Operations, then presented slides to the Committee which included the following points:

·       Performance levels were acknowledged to be at an all-time low both in terms of the percentage of calls answered (58% in September against a target of 90%) and the percentage of visitors seen in 20 minutes (61% in September against a target of 70%).

·       A key reason for the change in the performance statistics was the removal of the call capping from the telephony system. Previously, there had been two types of call capping:

o   A limit on the number of calls that could come into the system at any one point.

o   A limit on the number of callers that could join a queue on each line.

·       Since the removal of call capping, any number of people could join a queue and many would tend to wait until their call was answered.

·       There had been successive years of reduced budgets which inevitably led to reduced staffing.

·       The volume of calls to the contact centre was relatively steady. However, when the demand was matched to the budget and staffing available, this led to difficult figures. Ideally there would be 22.5 FTE posts to take calls against current actual staffing levels of 13.5 FTE posts on the phone lines.

Nathan Pierce, Chief Digital & Innovation Officer, then presented slides to the Committee which included the following points:

·       The Digital & Change team was involved in service modernisation through the digital transformation programme which would lead to improvements in the customer contact centre, primarily by reducing demand.

·       There was a new Digital Policy and a Digital governance structure that oversaw all digital and technology implementations.

·       Haringey’s internal team of developers were able to redesign entire processes in the Council from the first interaction with a resident to the end resolution being realised. The whole journey could be automated from beginning to end. 

·       The service modernisation programme was configured to be a savings programme so much of this work would have an impact on reducing demand to the customer contact centre.

·       The Service Modernisation Portfolio Board was overseen by Cllr Dana Carlin, Cabinet Member for Finance & Corporate Services, chaired by Taryn Eves, Director of Finance, and included all members of the Corporate Leadership Team.

·       The Board used a prioritisation framework to drive the business processes being worked on. This was primarily based on savings.

·       The Portfolio had been launched in May 2025 with work prioritised in Adults, Housing & Health and Children’s Services. There were around 25-30 live projects at any given time. There were at least 60 more of these projects in the pipeline and it was up to the Board which of these were prioritised next.

·       The guaranteed savings for next year were approximately £2.5m with more speculative savings possible on top of that.

·       A large piece of work was underway with Housing, looking at housing repairs and damp & mould which cause a lot of demand to the Customer Contact Centre. These areas were being redesigned so that it was fully automated and online.

·       Another large area was the transformation of the digital platform for customers with a whole range of new channels including web bots and AI as an alternative to using the Customer Contact Centre.

·       There would be a new digital forms platform and CRM (Customer Relationships Management) to manage customer information and data which should be running by the end of the year.

Responses were then provided to questions from the Committee Members:

·       Cllr White commented that previous savings rounds had attributed cost reductions to residents moving to digital self-service and expressed concerns that staff numbers had been reduced before the savings and reductions had been achieved. He queried whether information about previous savings proposals in this area could be brought to the Committee to establish what had actually been achieved. Discussion followed on a number of points:

o   Cllr Chandwani commented that multi-year savings may have been agreed previously that were only now being implemented.

o   Cllr Carlin highlighted the establishment of the new digital team and said that this investment had not previously been put in to implement new programmes and ways of delivering. New processes that enabled people to, for example, change appointments by smartphone rather than phoning the Customer Contact Centre, would reduce the overall demand on customer services.

o   Taryn Eves emphasised the need to get much tighter at making sure that delivery plans were clearly formulated before the money was taken out of the budget at the start of the year. With this programme, she explained that savings were built into the current year and future years, but these sat corporately with no savings allocated to services from 2026/27 onwards. A process had been established where all identified savings were agreed between Digital and the relevant service area.

o   Barry Francis, Corporate Director of Environment & Resident Experience, concurred that some budget decisions pre-dated savings actually being made due to the multi-year approach. He added that the work of the Digital team in making information easier to find online was helping with the channel shift and reducing demand on the telephony system. This tended to mean that the calls that were still coming through were more complex cases and this led to longer average call times. Around 40% of contacts related to housing and so the work that Nathan Pierce had spoken about would release some of the burden on the customer contact centre and face-to-face. Also, as the demand was driven by the services themselves and so a preventative approach would help to underpin savings.

·       Asked about call-capping, Barry Francis explained that this had previously been used to help manage demand but the office was now overwhelmed by what was coming through so change options were being examined. Elaine Prado said that bespoke messaging could be used for the calls that could not get through depending on the service areas as opposed to an engaged tone that would have been heard under the old system. Nathan Pierce added that, in addition to the new telephony system, other channels would include AI chatbots which could deal with certain tasks and binary questions.

·       Cllr Small commented that some residents would prefer to have a long call waiting time rather than not being able to get through at all. Cllr Chandwani felt that both options were frustrating for residents and so it was necessary to consider why nearly a quarter of a million phone calls were made each year and how a proportion of these could be avoided. An example could be an online tracker for housing repair visits so that residents did not need to call for an update if a visit was running late.

·       Cllr Small observed that some previous savings had been forced due to the budget position and that reducing budgets and staffing levels was not a service delivery point but a cut that was putting too much pressure on the customer services staff. Cllr Chandwani responded that most Councils across the country were having to make savings but acknowledged that savings had to be made in the right way so that they were not counter-productive. However, even if more funding was available, it would still be necessary to modernise customer services as, for example, phoning up to change an appointment was out of date compared to other methods such as apps that were now available with other services. It was also necessary to ensure that the solution actually dealt with the problem and met people’s needs. She added that closer working between teams (including the physical location of teams) could improve the flow of information, for example by moving the staff responsible for housing calls into the repairs office.

·       Cllr White asked whether the starting point of these solutions was the direct experience of residents rather than what worked for the Council. Nathan Pierce said that the service user was at the core of a modern digital service and that the team followed the government’s digital design standards and user centre design methodology. He added that part of the new digital team included user design experts.

·       Cllr Gunes asked how people who were digitally excluded or found the technology frustrating would be able to access the new system. Cllr Chandwani commented that a balance needed to be struck because many residents were able to use technology but couldn’t access the Council’s services in the ways that they wanted to. The aim was therefore to remove some people from the queue who could access services in other ways, but others could still use the phone if required.

·       Acknowledging the high levels of pressure on staff and high rates of staff sickness, Cllr Connor asked what would be done to relieve this pressure in the interim period before new digital channels were up and running. Cllr Chandwani said that the distinction between Customer Services and Digital was that Digital was an enabling service that worked across all areas of the Council to create technological solutions. While this may create more channels for residents to contact the Council, the other Departments would still need to deliver services effectively in order to resolve the issues and prevent the need for repeat contacts. Barry Francis commented that there was an ongoing recruitment campaign to fill existing vacancies within the Customer Contact Centre. In addition, by managing ‘net call’ as had previously been discussed, this could improve the customer waiting period and the experience for people calling. He added that, while some of the Digital work was longer term, some aspects could be expected to have an impact quite quickly.

·       Cllr Connor queried what data would be available to be able to track the impact that new digital channels were having on reducing demand to other parts of customer services. Barry Francis said that, in terms of governance and oversight, there was a Service Modernisation Board chaired by Taryn Eves which had been covered in Nathan Pierce’s presentation. There was also a Resident Experience Board which he and Taryn Eves co-Chaired and this looked at a combination of the digital enablers to examine what impact they were having and how this could be measured. In the longer-term there was a wider issue about managing demand, particularly in housing. Nathan Pierce explained that the previous telephony system had been in place for at least 15 years and the new modern system would enable the measurement of a whole range of ways that people accessed the Council, including details of what they called about, what the issue was and whether it was resolved. It would also record what other channels they had accessed the Council through. With a richer collection of data and integrated platforms there would be a better view of how individuals interact with Council services. This new system would take a while to be fully implemented with some information generated within the next couple of months but the wider single view of customer data likely to take a couple of years to be fully realised. Jenna Scott-Brining, Head of Digital, added that the new system would give Customer Services a richer data set on what was happening operationally in terms of performance which would assist them in coming up with a range of improvements.

·       Cllr Connor agreed that the changes seemed to be positive but queried whether the reductions in staff were cost effective, particularly in view of the high level of staff sickness with the remaining staff. Asked by Cllr Connor whether this partly related to stress, Elaine Prado acknowledged that a lot of sickness was due to the pressure and demands of the job itself.