Contact centre challenges for the public sector

Echo recently attended the ‘Channel Shift Live’ event for public sector leaders and practitioners responsible for delivering frontline public services, where we showcased our portfolio of outsourced managed services. It gave us a great opportunity to speak at length with attendees - council and government contact centres managers from across the country - in a bid to understand the current ‘pain points’ around customer service in their space.

At Echo we speak with a wide range of organisations, so we were particularly interested to find out how today’s evolving public sector challenges differed from their colleagues in the private sector. In summary the answer was - not hugely – both public and commercial organisations want (and need) to deliver an exceptional customer service at a cost-effective price! But what was apparent is that while the public sector acknowledges the benefits of incorporating channels such as web chat and social media into their contact mix, it’s often harder to unlock the new investment needed to get such contact programmes up and running.

We’re already talking to several public bodies about how Echo can help in these areas. For example by using our experience to design customer service journeys and justify investment in projects through business cases, providing pilot schemes to evaluate new technologies within an existing contact programme. In some cases outsourcing part or all of a customer service to us here at Echo could be an option to enable them to adopt new technologies and optimise the customer service experience to citizens without being exposed to the investment risk.

As a result of our conversations at the event we’ve put together what we see are the five key customer contact challenges public sector organisations face in 2014 - which you can read.