Automated Telephony

As part of the Customer Access Programme, Cornwall Council are seeking innovative ways to deliver customer contact and customer self service. Currently our contact centre receives over 850,000 calls a year for a number of services that are offered from our customer services centre. We are seeking solutions that can reduce manual handling of those calls but also ensure a good level of customer satisfaction. After the implementation of automated telephony in our Council Tax and Benefits services, we are now seeking to explore through market ways to build on this work. Our customer access programme aims to save £2million in the next 3 years and telephony is one area where there is opportunity to make significant reductions in demand to our contact centre and back office. As such we have defined 4 areas we wish to explore as set out below:

1. Management of general enquiries and switchboard services 2. Automated self-service for customers to access information, pay bills, provide information receive updates 3. Automated integration into back office 4. Out of hours

The outcome we seek for this exercise is to define which technologies fit with our digital by preference approach for customer access with a clear view to ensure that we manage customer satisfaction to a good or high level.

As part of this process interested parties are invited to complete the attached questionnaire, following which they may be invited to discuss their offering in more detail.