This is not new news, it has been getting harder to speak to someone at the council over a few years!  Unfortunately, the reason is, the large cost of running the call centre.

The Council Needs a Modern Phone System

To help meet the cuts in the council budget, people are, wherever possible directed to the website.  I have written about this before but I think it deserves more attention.  Many people cannot get on the internet and have to ring the council instead.  This has two major problems:

• the phone number is not as easy to find as it used to be – deliberately to try to encourage people to use the internet and,
• with limited staff in the call centre it can sometimes take ages for anyone to answer !

The answer, it seems to me, with my background in software and IT, is that the council should get up to date with the latest technology and install a voice recognition system.  I know many people don’t like talking to computers but to be honest, there are not many alternatives – the council faces further cuts in the coming years and the prospect of taking on lots of staff to expand the call centre is remote.

There is good news though.  The latest systems are far better than the first systems that call centres installed years ago where you had to press the numbers on your keypad and it seemed to take forever to go round in circles.  No, the latest systems allow you to say what your issue is and the clever software repeats it back to you for you to confirm.  And, it is getting better all the time.

This would not be a cheap option to set up and it would not instantly cure the problem completely but it just might help a lot of people get the information they need from the council – or easily leave a message for someone to ring back about if appropriate.  But, in the long term it would help the council save money AND give a better service.

The Liberal Democrats are not in power in Stockport at the moment so we can’t make the decision at the moment.  But, I have emailed my bank, they has a really good system now, to see if I can get some information and start to get a plan together that might just get the ball rolling.  The council can borrow money very cheaply, and if a long term cost saving can be shown then it is called prudential borrowing.