Media release
03 December 2012

Auckland Council appoints TelstraClear to standardise its call centres

After a competitive tender process, Auckland Council said it has appointed TelstraClear to head a project to standardise and simplify its customer call centres.

Council engaged TelstraClear as part of a wider programme of work to continue to unify its core systems and business processes. This wider programme of work will make Council more efficient; saving ratepayers $50.1 million, over the next 10-year period.

A little over two years ago, Auckland Council was formed out of the amalgamation of eight different legacy councils and their business units. This also necessitated the bringing together of eight different operating systems and that work is still very much ongoing.

As part of this, council inherited a call centre service model which was designed to keep services stable through the transition period, as well as provide callers access to council via a single telephone number. While this temporary system continues to work, call centres remain located in each of the legacy council areas and the multiple systems supporting these are expensive and unsustainable.

A single, comprehensive call centre system and supporting processes are now required to provide the best possible support to council staff and to better serve Aucklanders, as promised through the Auckland and Long-term plans, now and into the future.

“We will replace the many different call centre systems with one single system that’s cheaper to operate overall, more reliable, and one which provides a better service to Aucklanders,” said Nigel King, Auckland Council’s manager of customer services. “The systems we inherited at the time of amalgamation no longer serve an organisation of Auckland Council’s size and we will replace it with a single cost-effective model that’ll serve our needs for years.”

Council estimates that investing in this call centre solution will have an overall benefit of $7.3 million as well as making its customer contact systems more efficient.

Ends

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"Unlawful, Unjustified And Unreasonable": Report Into Urewera Raids Finds Police Acted Unlawfully

Independent Police Conduct Authority Chair Judge Sir David Carruthers said today that the decision by the then Commissioner of Police to undertake the operation in Ruatoki Valley and elsewhere on 15 October 2007 was reasonable and justified.

“However, the road blocks established by Police at Ruatoki and Taneatua were unlawful, unjustified and unreasonable... Police had no legal basis for stopping and searching vehicles or photographing drivers or passengers,” he said...

The report also showed that the detention of the occupants at five properties examined by the Authority was unlawful and unreasonable. More>>