Sadly, yet more poor service levels at the Newport Council ‘Contact Centre’.
Newport City Council. The main contact telephone number is 01633-656656.
Every week, the council will receive thousands of telephone calls, mainly from members of the public. Most of these calls are channeled into its main contact centre where a dedicated team of service advisors are on hand to help.
The number of phone calls are recorded in terms of total inbound calls, abandoned calls, average wait-times, etc. These are then collated into reports.
In the past, I’ve often reported on the poor service levels at the council’s ‘Contact Centre’. However. This time, read about it from Newport Council themselves!
The recent publication of the Council’s Finance Mid-Year Review Report outlines an average main ‘wait-time’ target of 5 minutes or less at the Contact Centre.
However. The report has shown it missed its 5 minute target by a big margin. The report shows an average wait-time of 13 minutes and 4 seconds for Quarter 2 of 2023/24.
In response, the council has stated:-
“We’ve seen increased attrition in customer services resulting in the need to recruit and train new staff members. We have also had to back-fill 4 posts due to maternity leave. Nearly back to full compliment of staff so should start to see this decrease.”
A separate report published on the Council’s website has further ‘drilled down’ into the numbers. There were 50,233 calls made overall to the Contact Centre in Q2 of this financial year (July to Sept 2023). 17,883 were abandoned. That means over one in three callers hung-up the phone when trying to get through to the council (35.6%).
The average wait-time overall was 13.04 minutes, however it was much worse on the dedicated Council Tax line which had a wait-time of 23.14 minutes. Of course, these are averages, so the wait-time during busy periods could be much higher.
Shockingly. Only 66 calls were made to Council’s dedicated Welsh language line for Q2 (out of 50,233). Worryingly, even from the 66 inbound calls received, 50 of those hung-up the phone! Truly unbelievable!
Newport Council has faced heavy criticism in the past few years over its poor service levels, with several news stories published in the South Wales Argus.
When will the council finally fix this and staff up its Contact Centre with appropriate levels?
