The Challenge
The London Borough of Lambeth Council is one of 14 local authorities that make up inner London. It measures seven miles north to south and two and a half miles east to west. It is one of the most densely populated boroughs of inner London, with a population of approximately 270,000 citizen customers.

Providing important services to these customers is the Lambeth Service Centre (LSC) based at Olive Morris House, which employs 120 agents and staff to manage more than 1.3 million inbound telephone calls each year. They provide a varied and important service for the council including signposting, information provision and service delivery for telephone enquiries that relate to environmental services, housing supply and demand (Lambeth Council is responsible for 36,000 council homes), social services, planning, issues of anti-social behaviour and the council switchboard.

With a customer mission statement to uphold – To exceed the expectations of all our customers, consistently delivering excellent and cost-effective public services – the LSC decided to look at how they could continue to improve the quality of service it delivers to customers. It wanted to investigate why customers need to call, or repeat call, and in turn take positive action to reduce the amount of avoidable contact, to the benefit of both the customer and the LSC.

Allan Drew is the Divisional Director for Customer Services at the Finance & Resources Department of Lambeth Council and he cites several examples of an avoidable contact: "A customer may be seeking unnecessary clarification, progress chasing, asking for reassurance, or another form of unnecessary service delivery follow up. Alternatively, there may be repeat contact with a customer who has to provide the same information a number of times in order to carry a specific transaction."

The Solution
In the past the LSC had relied on anecdotal evidence and information that could be extracted from its IT systems, however, this proved unreliable and inaccurate in determining the levels of avoidable contact. Adopting a fresh and innovative approach the council embarked upon a pioneering project in UK public services as Drew explains: "We wanted to find a solution that would enable us to understand why customers call us, address the root cause of dissatisfaction and service failure and to ultimately reduce avoidable call demand."

During an exhaustive tender process the LSC team investigated different solutions and approaches before selecting NICE SmartCenterä, specifically for its interaction analytics technology. "It was apparent that NICE Systems were a market leader and also it was a partner of BT which provides the Lambeth Council’s telephony system," comments Drew on the reasons for NICE Systems winning the tender. "It was agreed that NICE Systems were best placed to meet the requirements of the council."

The Benefits
The introduction of NICE SmartCenterä has enabled the LSC to capture accurate information to explain why customers call, how many interactions are avoidable and begin to understand the true nature of all its customer contacts.

A typical example of such customer insight relates to calls about vehicle parking, where the LSC has been able to capture all inbound calls, identify those concerning parking and review the reason for the customer enquiry. Drew explains: "Early analysis of these insights pinpointed parking permits and broken meters as significant reasons for contact. From this we were able to delve deeper, identifying the drivers of customer dissatisfaction and in turn use this to make an informed decision to counter the cause of the problem."

Such insight is possible by using the software tools and techniques within NICE SmartCenterä. By using interaction analytics LSC is able to create search parameters to ‘listen’ automatically for words and phrases that may typically be used by customers during an avoidable contact such as ‘parking fine’ or ‘I called last week’. Every captured inbound call is indexed and checked against these set parameters by NICE SmartCenterä and wherever matches are found they are flagged to the team for further review.

Interaction analytics is also playing a pivotal role in the quality monitoring of agents at the LSC. The Quality and Development Team are able to gain higher visibility of calls and extract more accurate information related to them by being alerted to calls that demonstrate heightened levels of emotion detection, or irregular speech patterns, for example, the council now has the ability to monitor calls that contain more than 33% silence. "This has allowed us to work pro-actively with managers and agents and has already resulted in a reduced call handling time and increased quality of call handling," notes Drew.

Although use of NICE SmartCenteräis still in its infancy at the LSC it has already delivered significant benefits to Lambeth Council, better enabling it to understand the type and quality of customer interactions taking place and making a valuable contribution in upholding the council’s customer mission statement. Drew concludes: "The unprecedented levels of customer insight that NICE Systems is enabling us to achieve allows us to determine accurately the level of avoidable contact and pinpoint business improvement opportunities. It empowers us to improve the quality-of-service provided to all of our customers whilst reducing levels of avoidable contact."

About London Borough of Lambeth Council:
The London Borough of Lambeth Council is one of 14 local authorities that make up inner London. It measures seven miles north to south and two and a half miles east to west. It is one of the most densely populated boroughs of inner London, with a population of approximately 270,000 citizen customers.

About NICE Systems:
NICE Systems (NASDAQ: NICE) is the leading provider of Insight from Interactions solutions and value-added services, powered by advanced analytics of unstructured multimedia content – from telephony, web, radio and video communications. NICE’s solutions address the needs of the enterprise and security markets, enabling organizations to operate in an insightful and proactive manner, and take immediate action to improve business and operational performance and ensure safety and security. NICE has over 24,000 customers in more than 150 countries, including more than 85 of the Fortune 100 companies.