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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Gordon Campbell: On Failures Of Care For Those With Mental Disabilities

Hard to imagine a more disturbing insight into the treatment of the vulnerable than the Health Ministry report on Te Roopu Taurima o Manukau. The Ministry has found that the country’s only kaupapa Maori intellectual disability residential care provider has been “seriously dysfunctional.”

The ministry says the business has failed to recruit and retain quality staff – and says the kaimahi (caregivers) that have been employed are seriously unsuitable for the job, lacking basic knowledge. But Te Roopu Taurima o Manukau doesn’t get all the blame. The report says there’s a significant gap under disability laws to ensure there’s oversight by qualified clinical professionals. More>>