Large public sector organisation

Diagnosis of customer service, technology and management issues after a major building move

Shortly after moving into a ‘state-of-the-art’ building, our client start receiving complaints from the public that it was hard to contact them by phone. Employees started reporting quality problems with telephone calls – distortion and calls ‘dropping’. Senior management’s serious concern over lack of progress in resolving the issues led them to ask David to diagnose independently what were the problems and why had they arisen.

BWe used a three step approach: (1) assess performance objectively; (2)perform a root cause analysis to identify the improvement actions and; (3) review governance and controls around key decisions.

We made 500 test calls to client staff, using a team with a mix of accents. Each followed a simple questionnaire with little scope for subjective judgement. This allowed us to assess the performance of a system using voice recognition, obtain data on our client’s staff’s perception of quality and measure objectively our experience of quality. We found that there were minor issues with voice recognition, significant technical issues with quality and an unacceptable number of calls going through to voice mail systems due to staff behaviour – it was indeed difficult to contact our client’s people.

During the root cause analysis, we mapped the end-to-end system, identified the service risks for each component and checked whether they had materialised. Unusually, the new building’s telephony solution used a public cellular service to send calls to staff iPhones, rather than traditional desk-phones. Thus the system that had intrinsic, unpalatable characteristics that could not be improved above a certain level – i.e dropped calls and occasional distorted calls are a fact of life in using a mobile phone.

Finally, using interviews and papers, we stepped through management decision making from strategy, design, procurement, contacting, implementation and operation. We found that IT management embarked on a strategy with no business case and ignored warning signs that the approach was fraught with risk.

We helped our client make a case for change and new customer service strategy to improve access to services.

We found IT leadership had performed poorly. Our recommendations enabled our client to improve its governance, control and leadership of IT related change and informed its decision to extricate itself from a 5 year contract for a solution that did not meet business needs.