Capita will present to committee members on the following:
a. Contact Centre capacity
b. Contact Centre Quality of Service
c. Financial Accuracy of Housing Benefit Claims
d. Questions from the Committee
Minutes:
Gareth Stemp, Head of Customer Services for Capita, presented some slides to the committee.
Gareth explained that Capita handled South and Vale’s switchboard only, and that’s why the figures differ from Mendip.
Gareth talked about how quality is measured, with effort going into making this as good as it can be. This included recruiting the right people and training and mentoring them. There was a quality assurance team who look for improvements. Real time support is in place virtually.
The call structure, which had been tried and tested, was shown to the committee on the presentation. Future plans include involvement of local authority officers to mark calls. Also looking into having an end-to-end customer satisfaction measure.
Forecasting workload and capacity needs was conducted 12 months in advance by the Resource planning team. This plan fuels recruitment, with the aim of satisfying the performance measures. Resource planning team will hand over to the real time team, who manage day to day demand and can move resources if they need to.
5CP specific staff need 3 months to be trained on the specific systems. Gareth informed the committee that they do not have spare resources for this but there is resilience, mainly due to multiskilling and measures to move workload priorities.
Committee asked questions of clarification. Discussion was had regarding customer satisfaction. Capita representative added that they could look at complaints as a statistic and it was asked by a committee member whether dropped calls could be a performance measure. Could a profile of call times be given? Matt Goodwin added that further data can be provided by Capita, such as profiles and average handling times. Dropped calls was noted as a potential future measure.
Action: Matt Goodwin to look into a dropped calls measure.
It was clarified that officer involvement in call marking was still a work in progress. The first run of results may be available before Christmas. Mystery shopping was being investigated, but you need to have enough callers to make it a significant statistic, without negatively impacting the service.
Action: Matt Goodwin to follow up on mystery shopping.
On behalf of Havant, Cllr Bowerman thanked the Capita team for their work.
Gareth Stemp spoke in response to the waste collection issue. He explained that regular comms had been improved, and that Capita now received the Havant crew sheets to communicate to the public when asked.
Daniel Robson spoke to the committee regarding the financial measure that had failed – PI001.
The measurement of this PI was a monthly 10% sample check of manually processed benefits decisions selected at random. The calculation was for the number found to be financially accurate. The annual target was 96%.
It is difficult to meet the target, as one adverse month can affect overall good improvement month on month. The checking process was for the more complex human decisions, in an ever-evolving service. Additional checking on officers was conducted and training given. Capita acknowledge there was some inconsistency, but they were working on improvements and had seen improvement in 2021 against previous years. A new sign off sheet had been working well, to check that various stages in the process had been fully completed by officers.
Tom Alderman had been recruited by Capita as a performance manager, who will work on a quality plan and improvements. There will be continuation of sign off sheets and robust 20% checks. The random sampling will be reviewed as part of the overall quality plan.