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Contact Kent really does put customers first.
It's not only a contact centre for KCC - a place for the public
to access information about its services - but also works in
partnership to provide other top quality contact services
throughout the South East.
Its primary objective is to enable KCC to make its services more
accessible, convenient, responsive and cost effective for the
people of Kent.
It provides round the clock information from 'real' people and
is the first point of contact to KCC services. Whether a caller
needs to register a birth or death, enrol for Adult Education or
report a pothole, Contact Kent can help.
Since April 2004, Contact Kent has ensured that KCC's customers
have access to its services when it is convenient for them by
operating a 24/7 service from a state-of-the-art, 150 seat contact
centre based in central Maidstone.
KCC believes each call is unique and, therefore, requires a
unique response. In order to meet customers' needs. Contacts are
handled not only by telephone but also by post and increasingly via
email and SMS text.
In the future, Contact Kent will continue to strengthen its
links with service units across KCC, providing valuable support and
enhancing the customer experience. This more joined up approach to
service delivery will result in efficient and cost effective
service delivery, realising savings through economies of scale.
Contact Kent works in partnership with service units across KCC
and provides an out of hours service for some local district and
borough councils. It also runs Consumer Direct South East in
partnership with the 19 Trading Standards authorities in the
Government Office for the South East (GOSE) area and the Office of
Fair Trading - supporting eight million consumers.
In September 2006 Contact Kent was benchmarked against other
council contact centres in Kent and Medway and it achieved the
highest score for the quality of its call handling.
It's a busy place - in 2006, the centre handled over 1.3 million
calls, 84 per cent of them answered within 20 seconds. It also
handled 95,000 emails. It is anticipated that Contact Kent will
receive and deal with nearly two million calls in
2008. |