Surrey Police set standards on customer service

Background

In line with the Home Office initiative to be more responsive to the public, Surrey Police decided to improve the quality of service they provided in their contact centre. The Surrey Police management team then looked to the commercial sector for high quality service delivery procedures, which could be applied specifically for the police requirement.

The requirement 

The aim was to set Best Practice guidelines and develop a method of recording results. As experienced providers of solutions that help contact centres measure, analyse and improve service, Business Systems was chosen to help 

establish a new quality monitoring programme.

Surrey Police’s Contact Centre has 155 call-handlers who are responsible for receiving 1.5 million calls per year, consisting of non-urgent calls, calls to the Crime Reporting Bureau and emergency ‘999’ calls. Surrey’s contact centre experiences similar challenges to those of a commercial centre. As many as ninety five percent of inbound calls requesting a police officer are not classified as genuine emergencies. As call routing cannot be used, each call has to be evaluated as to whether it is a genuine emergency, and the appropriate level of response decided upon.

Call-handlers must be able to manage the expectations of callers, offering appropriate reassurance, so they feel they have had satisfactory service. A variety of different skills need to be measured throughout the contact centre, for example ensuring a high quality of data input in the crime-reporting bureau.

Solution

A specialist quality-monitoring consultant from Business Systems spent 2 weeks in the Surrey contact centre assessing needs and produced a Development Needs Analysis report (DNA). This outlined clearly which areas should be measured and what overall objectives should be achieved. The next step that Business Systems carried out was the creation of Best Practice Guidelines, including creating scoring sheets which would be used by supervisors when listening to recorded calls. Measurement criteria were established including looking at the call-handlers’ use of IT systems, along with assessment of soft skill areas such as their ability to manage expectations.

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