York Council explains telephone answering delays

Time taken to answer telephone calls to the York Council

Time taken to answer telephone calls to the York Council

The number of complaint calls to the Council almost doubled when the ill-fated new refuse collection schedules were introduced on 9th September.

Over 5500 residents tried to raise issues with the Council

Callers faced an average wait of nearly 3 minutes before being answered.

42% gave up waiting and hung up.

Commercial switchboard operators typically have a target “Time to Answer” of less than 20 seconds.

Swiychboard
The problems were exacerbated last week by the failure of the Council to update its database to allow its web site to be used to report missed bins.

The Council has promised to take action to align staff resources to more closely match demand levels in the future.

York Council call centre customers face 20 minute wait

Figures for August released today by the Council will confirm many residents experiences.

The time being taken by the Council to answer telephone calls is ridiculously high.

West Offices

In some cases, residents have had to wait for 20 minutes for their call to be answered.

Many Councils routinely publish on their web site quality of service stats covering basic services such as the time taken to deal with issues. The York Council fails to do so.

In response to a Freedom of Information request, the Council has now admitted that the maximum time that telephone callers had to wait, during the week commencing 5th August, was:

Between 8:00am and 9:00am 3:52 mins (maximum waiting time for call to be answered)

9am-10am 11:30 mins

10am-11am 09:22 mins

11am-12am 08:34 mins

12am -1pm 12:32 mins

1pm -2 pm 11:56 mins

2 pm-3pm 20:22 mins

3pm -4pm 10:27 mins

4pm -5 pm 10:03 mins

5pm -5:30pm 16:21 mins

The failures have prompted calls for the switchboard to remain open for an additional hour to deal with the backlog.

It is likely that many callers will have abandoned their attempts to get through.

The figures suggest that the quality of service being provided by the Council has declined since it moved into its new “state of the art” West Office building