Concerns raised over missed Fife Council phone calls

For 2017/18, 637,000 calls were made to the contact centre, however, only 523,000 were answered, meaning 114,000 people did not get their calls answered.

Councillor Tim Brett has urged the current administration to keep the situation under review.

He said: “During the last quarter of 2017/18 the contact centre performance, in terms of calls answered, dropped to 73 per cent – in the previous three quarters the performance had been over 84 per cent.

“I appreciate that there was a surge in calls due to the severe weather incident.

“Last week I was contacted by a constituent who was left waiting for his call to be answered after his bin had not been collected, in the end he gave in as he was worried about the cost of the call.

The contact centre’s performance could and should be better.”

Customer Service team leader Beverley Shepherd said: “We have reconfigured our teams in the contact centre to manage calls as best we can with the resources we have. 
“However, there is no doubt that this is placing a strain on call volumes and answer rates.

“We are working on ways to make the council a more modern and accessible organisation so that customers can carry out more business online.

“We will be recruiting some additional resource, which will be focused on improving the current call answering rates.”