All of South Wales Police’s call handling has been consolidated to just one lone Public Service Centre, in order to handle both emergency and non-emergency calls. Thanks to IP telephony, the centre is among the first to carry out such consolidation and already has made savings on internal charges on the entire South Wales Police voice estate.
OpenScape Contact Centre from Siemens, along with technology from OpenScape Voice, sees that every single call is handled with effectiveness and efficiency by just one core scalable platform. Allowing cost savings in technology in addition to building consolidation and other efficiency savings, the contact centre results in reduced public expenditure by the force. It is contributing millions in savings in a span of four years.
Previously, agents were expected to answer the call, deal with the enquiry, and then pass on and solve the problem, without the ability to use real-time data. OpenScape Contact Center, integrated with OpenScape Voice infrastructure, which is currently being used by the force, has improved effectiveness and response times to 999 calls. Resolution rates of initial calls have increased with intelligent use of skill-based routing. Calls can now be ordered on priority before being dispatched to the relevant agent.
South Wales Police’s Public Service Centre Manager, Tracey Cook, said:
“Emergency 999 calls are our number one priority. This means we need guaranteed performance and scalability from our infrastructure. We cannot have technical failures impacting our service to the public, and we are extremely impressed with the reliability and resilience of the OpenScape Contact Center. Siemens Enterprise Communications’ faultless support was essential to the success of the project.”
She concluded her comments by saying that it was essential for the changeover to occur as there cannot be any disrupted service or outage periods in the emergency service.
