Mitel enhances customer service for South Lakeland and Eden district councils

Mitel has delivered a contact centre solution to South Lakeland and Eden district councils in Cumbria, England, to enhance the customer experience. The virtual solution also allows home-based agents to integrate seamlessly into the contact centre and supervisors to manage and monitor operations from any location.
Implemented by Gateshead-based IT Professional Services, MiContact Centre for Lync from Mitel integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Lync to deliver advanced contact centre applications for the district councils’ 25 customer service agents, all in a familiar, easy-to-use Microsoft Office interface.

Features including presence-aware telephony, conferencing and messaging have significantly improved the contact centre experience for customers, as Caroline Metcalfe, Contact Centre Team Leader at South Lakeland’s site in Kendal, explains: “The Mitel solution has had a positive impact on the quality of service and has been very well received by customers using our contact centre. We can provide much richer information to callers and the ease of transferring interactions and collaborating with knowledge workers throughout the council has increased first call resolution rates and reduced call times.”

The virtual contact centre environment gives home-based agents complete access to all the voice and data capabilities of the contact centre and ensures customer service is not impacted if agents cannot reach the council sites. The management capability has been extended to the home, enabling supervisors to spot problem areas, analyse trends, make decisions in real-time and also help to take calls at peak times.

At Eden district council, Linda Methven, Customer Services and Transformation Manager, reports: “Officers working in virtual offices, in the field, on location and working at home, are benefitting from the ability to access full telephony using their laptops and Lync. Mitel’s Automatic Call Distribution is opening up opportunities for home-based contact centre staff to improve both operational efficiency and customer service. This has been a hugely beneficial and positive change for the contact centre, officers and customers of Eden district council.”

The Mitel solution has allowed the two district councils to adopt a more agile and proactive approach to citizen communication. For example, skills-based routing enabled South Lakeland to direct council tax-related calls to specialists in the contact centre, relieving pressure on the taxation department when new UK annual charges were communicated in March 2014.

Ben Wright, IT Services Manager, South Lakeland & Eden district council, comments: “The Mitel solution is ideal for our shared services environment, delivering tools to our contact centre supervisors to monitor and manage our performance, with the reliability and functionality agents need, regardless of location. Only months into the deployment and both District councils are already benefiting from the more agile and flexible approach, with very positive feedback from our teams.”
Graham Bevington, VP International Markets, Mitel, adds: “MiContact Centre for Lync is ideal for organisations that are invested in Microsoft Lync but need a more advanced and feature-rich contact centre solution, without added cost and complexity.”