Arrondissementsparket Amsterdam wanted to make their crowded telephone traffic more efficient. At the time, several teams had to process approximately 500,000 incoming calls each year. The challenge was to ensure efficient treatment from start to finish in all cases. To this end, every specific client demand had to be made available to the right department. Almost no standards and processes were designed or in place for this. Just the right challenge for Quintop.
Callcenter or not?
Setting up a callcenter often seems to be a great alternative to answering the thousands of incoming calls. To determine if this was the right solution in this case, Quintop looked at the way the telephone traffic was running through the organisation. In addition, the amounts and nature of telephone conversations were measured and recorded in combination with the type of employee.
To measure is to know
This measurement showed that the overall customer experience could be improved. Moreover, it turned out that only 30% of the phone calls could actually be handled by the call center in place. The remaining 70% was so complex and/or sensitive that they had to be connected to specialised secretaries or prosecutors. To be able to undertake these different handlings, a division of 30 people was needed. The question was whether it would be profitable to set up such an extra division and offer relevant training to those involved.
A creative solution
Setting up the call center was not the right solution. Instead, it was chosen to setup a voice response system. This allowed the distribution of all incoming telephone conversations to be automatically transferred, with the customer pulling the strings themselves. The cycle times were considerably shortened, and customers were helped more efficiently with their demands. In addition, fewer people were needed. The employees who were retained ran a new training program to improve overall service skills. Also, the incoming types of conversations were efficiently distributed over the various teams. All these results served the same ultimate goal: to make all that was done fully customer focussed.
