Dave wrote on Oct 7
th, 2007 at 10:35pm:
It is really good to hear that the DVLA will be switching to 03.
It appears that the DVLA continues on with its nose firmly in the 0870 trough.
To recap, one of the outcomes of the
Varney review was the recommendation that 03xx numbers should be adopted:
Quote:29. improving immediate access to public service departments and agencies and then to rationalise telephone numbers by:
- coordinating the implementation of a public sector wide number strategy utilising the new 0300 number range, to simplify access and tariffs for citizens and businesses to all departments and local authorities;
- publishing standard form descriptions of each department’s services on Directgov/Businesslink.gov (as appropriate); and
- publishing a government phonebook of public sector access numbers and targeting a reduction of 80 per cent of published telephone numbers and better signposting of the remaining numbers;
Members may be interested in reading
this article which looks at the Cabinet Office's
Contact Council, the body charged with implementing the recommendations of the Varney review:
Quote:Improving the front line of public services
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The Contact Council was set up last year to improve the performance of public sector call centres and to raise standards of service. Alison Thomas looks at what's been achieved so far.
Anyone forlornly pressing the hash key for the third time of asking – after spending 10 minutes listening to canned Mozart while being assured "Your call is important to us" – knows that call centres can leave a lot to be desired.
Step forward the Contact Council, the body established by the Cabinet Office to promote best practice across the public sector in all matters relating to customer contact.
Its initial task is to oversee the improvement of performance and standards in publicly-funded contact centres. In the longer term the council, launched last year, aims to build its membership to include representatives of more than 700 contact centres and will set out a vision for public service contact and provide professional advice and guidance.
It also aims to develop customer contact as a profession in government and create a network of professionals to improve the skills of the estimated 60,000 public sector contact centre staff.
"It's about learning across government from a business perspective," says the Cabinet Office's director of transformational government Alexis Cleveland. "The Contact Council is looking at contact centres across the whole of government, including local government, the police and the NHS. The best of the public sector contact centres perform at the level of the best of the private sector, but a lot don't reach that level at the moment."
[…]
Managing avoidable contact, including wrong numbers and progress-chasing calls, is another issue Cleveland has experience of from her days running the Pensions Service.
"We monitored why people were phoning us up and sometimes they were on the wrong number. Why? Because we had something like 17 different telephone numbers, so it wasn't unreasonable for people to have picked the wrong one.
"The Pensions Service is on the journey of coming down to only one number to phone, so that it can take out all those wasted calls.
[…]
Will this single phone number for the DWP be a 03xx one?
Will Recommendation 29 go by the wayside? It seems to me that, at present, the Contact Council is the only chance we have of the large public sector services doing the right thing and switching to 03xx.
Pages: 1 2
Sir David Varney Public Services Review (03x) (Read 21,043 times)
