Improving workforce management in citizen-facing staff: Bedfordshire County Council, UK

Serving a population of over 400,000 Bedfordshire Council provide a range of services including highways maintenance, social care, environmental amenities and education. In order to handle requests from the public better, and more cost effectively, they recently introduced a multi skilled customer engagement centre based on a contact centre model.
 
Aware that matching customer demand to available resources was key to making sure that phone wait times are minimised and ensuring customer service representatives with the right skills are available at the right times, the council decided to implement a workforce management (WFM) system powered by QPC systems.

Typical returns from WFM systems include a 10% reduction in resource costs and a similar improvement in the amount of time that a contact centre is able to meet its speed of answer targets. To support the WFM system the Council also decided to use a QPC Management Information (MI) system, providing optimised data to ensure that the Council’s investment in workforce management would give the very best business returns.