Improved round-the-clock services for local communities

6th April 2009

Three London councils are aiming to provide a better service to their residents, while at the same time reducing costs, by introducing an innovative shared out-of-hours service.

Ealing, Barking and Dagenham and Tower Hamlets councils are pioneering the new scheme, which covers a range of customer services that need to be dealt with outside normal working hours, such as complaints about noise, abandoned vehicles and various emergency calls.

The service is backed by London’s Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (RIEP) – Capital Ambition – and is available to all London boroughs and a wide range of other public sector organisations.

The service, run by Vangent, which specialises in customer interaction management, is helping to cut call handling costs by up to two thirds.

A number of other organisations are already planning to implement the service, which will create further savings for all those involved in the scheme.

Cllr Shaun Carroll, cabinet member for customer services at Barking and Dagenham Council said: “This new service means we are able to offer our residents more than 20 different services outside of normal working hours. Calls are dealt with quickly and efficiently, which means that even though our costs are reduced, people calling the council out-of-hours get a better service.”

The service is run from London, and tailored to the needs of each authority. Customer service staff use ground-breaking technology to identify the nature of each call, capture the relevant facts, then commission the appropriate action. This enables them to deal swiftly and efficiently with each query, for example alerting an anti-social behaviour officer via text message to attend an incident.

Nigel Rourke, business development director at Vangent, said: “The overwhelming interest in the out-of-hours shared service has encouraged us to offer the service across the rest of the country and we already have nationwide organisations considering the benefits. Our economies of scale and the investment we have made in our people, processes and technology are already allowing the early adopters to offer an otherwise unaffordable level of service to their customers during the evenings, early hours and weekends.”