Case Study: Mayo County Council Increase Agent Efficiency

This case study investigates how Mayo County Council managed to improve agent efficiency and overall customer service.

Mayo County Council is a local authority on Ireland’s west coast. Through nine regional offices and a team of 1,300 staff, it supports over 130,000 residents, delivering services, encompassing everything from housing to the environment, and from transportation to urban planning and development.

The council is among the most innovative in Ireland in adopting new technology. As part of their strategy they committed to the Microsoft Stack and subsequently implemented Microsoft Teams throughout the organization.

Once Teams was in place, the missing piece in the jigsaw was to find a contact centre solution to integrate with it and to manage calls made within the Teams environment.

It was key that the chosen solution was cloud-compatible, capable of refining internal processes and associated communications, and that it provided detailed reporting and call analytics.

On the advice of their trusted Microsoft Gold Partner, MJ Flood Technology, they decided to go with Enghouse Interactive Communications Center (CC) as it was able to meet all these requirements.

Danny O’Toole, Head of Digital Transformation, Mayo County Council, said: “We are a cloud-first, digital-first organization and that culture has matured since we moved to the Microsoft Stack.”

“We are one of the first local authorities in Ireland to roll out Microsoft Teams and also one of the first organizations worldwide to integrate Teams in to the contact centre.”

“We have a requirement for cutting-edge solutions that are fully integrated with the Teams platform. Of all the solutions we evaluated, CC most clearly fitted this need.”

Rolling out the Solution

MJ Flood Technology, supported Mayo County Council with the implementation of a beta version of Communications Center, built upon Microsoft Teams.

CC lived up to the council’s expectations and with the encouragement of MJ Flood Technology, Mayo took the decision to move to a commercial implementation.

MJ Flood Technology played a key role in developing the back end and infrastructure, especially in terms of implementing direct routing for Teams, ensuring the resilience of the network architecture and integrating CC fully with Microsoft Office 365, most notably including Teams.

Gauging the Benefits

With the CC solution now up and running, the council primarily uses it to support interactions with residents via telephone, although there is also some engagement via email and social media.

According to O’Toole, the operational challenges the council had at the outset of the project have been achieved: “Our customer service is much more fluid and we can make informed decisions with the data we are getting out of CC. It makes customer service much easier to manage and plan for.”

The council has also improved the experience for the customer following the implementation.

“The time it takes the customer to get where they want to be has vastly improved, along with first contact resolution,” said O’Toole.

It has also achieved greater operational efficiency, according to Claire Raftery, Business Analyst and member of the Digital Transformation Team at Mayo County Council:

“We have managed to eliminate some of the tedious administrative tasks such as manually changing the phone system to voicemail every night or manually forwarding the emergency out-of-hours system to a mobile phone.” 

“Also the ability and flexibility to change call queues automatically, which used to fall under IT, has also been a major benefit, especially given the additional call volumes COVID has driven, and the disruption it has caused, with agents having to work from home.”

“The agents themselves are now much more efficient in dealing with customers and the time involved has greatly reduced.”

Getting agents set up, trained and using the solution was quick and easy to do with most agents proficient in handling live interactions within a week. Productivity has grown as agents become more used to the technology.

Agents are now typically handling 30-40% more calls than they did before the solution was implemented and in some cases individuals are answering up to 300 calls per day. Mayo has also benefited from the additional support provided by being able to add additional users when call volumes are high.

CC has also been pivotal during the COVID-19 crisis. Mayo needed to set up a helpline to connect with residents and communities, and in particular the elderly and more vulnerable people in our communities who can find themselves isolated.

Mayo was able to quickly spin up a COVID response team over a weekend using CC and Microsoft Teams. The helpline has been crucial to those at risk as it has helped link them to vital services within the community and provided access to crucial amenities such as medical prescriptions, hot meals and grocery deliveries.

Future Thinking

Looking to the future, Mayo’s next step is to integrate CC with a high-quality CRM solution such as Microsoft Dynamics. This will give their agents access to more detailed information about their residents, enabling them to make more informed decisions and resolve enquiries quickly and easily.

As O’Toole explained: “The introduction of CC on Microsoft Teams has improved our customer service dramatically but one of the key objectives we now have is to get our customer service and CRM back office operational to meet the front-end CC.”

The council also envisages broadening its service offering by facilitating full social media integration. It has a communications department that is effective in the use of social media for reactive and proactive communications, and it anticipates this will be key to enhancing future customer service.

It is the latest stage in its digital transformation, in which MJ Flood Technology, Enghouse Interactive and CC has been instrumental, delivering a solution that streamlines service offerings and drives public engagement and interaction.

CC has taken our customer service to a new and unforeseen level satisfaction both internally and externally.

Author: Robyn Coppell