Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 77)
WEDNESDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2005
MS LESLEY
STRATHIE, MR
KEVIN BONE
AND MR
MATTHEW NICHOLAS
Q60 Natascha Engel: That is not really
the question I asked. The question was: how are you deciding on
the balance between who gets face-to-face contact and who gets
telephone contact. I know you say that it is far more efficient
and forms get filled in on time but they do not; often people
do not even get through to the call centre and once they do get
through they get held on the line for a very long time. You have
mentioned numerous times that we are dealing with very vulnerable
people; often they do not have access to a telephone, and often
they have pay-as-you-go mobiles. The issues are much, much bigger
than simply about efficiency savings. The question is, really,
how are you making the decision about where it is wise to have
Contact Centres. I think everybody would understand that the first
contact with the Contact Centre is fine, as long as you have got
access to face-to-face if you need it. That is not always true.
Ms Strathie: You have to start
with the learning. Most people prior to this change, prior to
Contact Centres and trying to take the claim over the 'phone,
rang up and said: "I have lost my job"; "I am unemployed"
or "I am sick" or "I have had an accident".
We said, before: "Well, you have to come into the office
and you will have to collect all these forms, then you will have
to take them away and we will give you an appointment, then you
will come back"—and everything else that has been explained.
So the model does not discriminate; the model now says: "You
telephone and you do not get an appointment, you actually start
the process of claims-making." People still turn up in our
offices that would have just turned up anyway. We explain to them
that the claim is taken over the 'phone and we point them to the
"warm" 'phone that puts them straight through, and they
deal with that there. The people who cannot do that are the people
who turn up in our office; they are not the people that try to
'phone, they are the people that turn up and say: "Help me.
I am unemployed, I need money." If those people cannot manage
that process we have to do it there. I am not going to say, with
75,000 people working for me, that I have nobody in any of those
offices that has not said: "You have to do it on the 'phone,
and I cannot help you", but that is the learning that we
have. The vast majority of customers are very, very happy to do
it on the 'phone. You are not happy if you cannot get through
on the 'phone, and that has been a real problem in some of the
Contact Centres. We all use the telephone for our busy lives and
we all know how frustrating it is when you cannot get through—even
more frustrating if you do not have money to live on.
Natascha Engel: I think all of us could
continue this conversation; I do not think there is a person here
who has not got direct experience, through constituents, where
that is not the case. The "warm" 'phones in the face-to-face
centres are also an issue; there is no privacy.
Q61 Mrs Humble: I hope I am not asking
a question that you might be going on to. Can you tell me what
the average call-back time for getting back in touch with benefit
claimants is against the department's target?
Mr Bone: Our target is two days
and it is running at different times in different call centres;
a lot of our call centres are actually achieving this—
Q62 Chairman: What is your best and
worst?
Ms Strathie: Our best is one day
and the worst is 10 days.
Q63 Mrs Humble: I have to tell you
I have a constituent who came to see me last week who was told
that he would have a call back in 14 days.
Ms Strathie: That is totally unacceptable.
Q64 Natascha Engel: But not uncommon,
and I think that is the issue.
Ms Strathie: We need to take that
away. I could quote you worse than 14 days in the summer time
when we first hit this problem and how we identified it. I can
tell you how we identified it, and that was because all customer
complaints that come up through an escalated route ring on a 'phone
in my office, in the Chief Executive's office, and are handled
there first before they are handed over to people who deal with
them. That is how we knew we had a major problem at that point,
and it was worse than 14 days. However, I am very disappointed
if we still have customers receiving that sort of information
now.
Q65 Mrs Humble: Do you backdate the
benefit to the initial contact? If somebody has to wait an inordinate
length of time—
Ms Strathie: Yes.
Q66 Mrs Humble: Reassure me, please,
that the claim will be dated from the first contact.
Ms Strathie: The first contact
day, absolutely.
Q67 Natascha Engel: What happens
if the 'phone is not answered, because that has been a really
big issue as well? There are lots of cases where X% of calls get
left on the 'phone until the 'phone either goes dead or it does
not answer and people give up, at which point people are paying
while they are hanging on. There are lots of cases where the 'phone
is not even picked up at all. How can you prove that you have
tried before to make contact and have your claim backdated?
Ms Strathie: The regulations would
allow that we take the claim from the first contact and we consider
the first day of unemployment—bearing in mind unemployment
is an active state and not a passive state, and so one has to
prove that one was actively seeking and fit for work on each of
those days. If someone gets through and they have been unemployed
for a week and they say: "I have been trying to get through
to your Contact Centre" then that would be a process of a
delayed claim that proved the active state for that period. Am
I right or am I wrong that we would have evidence to support whether
or not we were handling those calls, on management information,
to know whether that was accurate or not?
Mr Nicholas: Yes, if someone could
not get through on the 'phone and came into one of our offices
saying: "I want to make my claim today. I cannot get through
on the 'phone. I want today to be established as the first day",
then we would have the evidence that that was the first day—
Q68 Natascha Engel: So that is what
they would have to do; they would have to go to an office and
say: "I can't get through on the 'phone"?
Mr Nicholas: But we do have to
repeat that over the last months since the worst part of the summer
our record on answering calls has got enormously better. In October
we were taking 94% of calls straightaway, which is above what
most call centres would expect to do, which means we are now answering
the calls. That was not the case but there has been a massive
improvement.
Q69 Natascha Engel: The other very
big issue is that the number to call is often an 0845 number,
which is the local call rate. I am back to my point that many
of these people do not have telephones or have pay-as-you-go mobiles
and are paying a huge amount of money when they are left waiting.
There is a large number of people who are left waiting on the
'phone. Why is it not always free?
Ms Strathie: Because basically
nothing we deliver is a free good. This was a long debate in the
development of this programme, as to whether we had pay 'phones,
as to whether we called back mobiles, etc, and the cost of all
of that. One of the things we have been looking at now is: is
it better or not to get through and get the engaged tone than
get through and have all of the dialogue that tells you that we
cannot handle you at this point in time, because, especially if
you are ringing from a pay-as-you-go mobile, that is an expensive
telephone call, and that is one of the issues that we need to
face. Were we and others to decide that we were going to deliver
all of this free we would simply have to take money from another
area of business.
Q70 Michael Foster: Why does it have
to be an 0845 number? On most packages that is the most expensive.
Most of us have heaps of free minutes on our 'phones for which
we pay nothing if we ring an ordinary number; if we ring 0845
we actually pay. For many customers that is a real problem.
Mr Bone: One of the reasons an
0845 number is used is because you can use that number nationally
and it will route into the closest call centre, whereas if we
did not use an 0845 number you would have to have different numbers
for the different call centres. One of the things we want to do
with our telephony in the future is move to a virtual call centre
network so that we can handle the calls across all our network
of call centres rather than going to individual ones. That is
the main reason.
Q71 Natascha Engel: There has been
some concern expressed that once you shifted everything to your
virtual centres by 2008, where your first point of call is the
Contact Centre, this might then, as a cost-cutting measure, be
hived off abroad so that the call centres are closed down. I am
sure you have heard this before. Can you reassure us that that
will not happen?
Ms Strathie: Absolutely not, because
it would not be a decision for us. If that were the case, going
back to the earlier conversation, what Jobcentre Plus is there
to do is agreed by Ministers—what we directly deliver, what
we contest, what we out-source. You know how much we already spend
on our programmes through third-party provision. I have no idea
what the future will be and what Jobcentre Plus will be asked
to deliver directly long-term, but I suppose we would all be surprised
if it was off-shored, given we are a public service.
Q72 Chairman: Do you have the authority
to offshore it?
Ms Strathie: No. We are the delivery
arm of the department, we provide services to our sister businesses
in DWP and we provide services to lots of other government bodies,
like local authorities. Therefore, we do what we are asked to
do and as agreed by Ministers. If Ministers decided they no longer
wanted Jobcentre Plus to deliver elements of that business then
we would have to manage that through, but we would not make those
decisions.
Q73 Michael Foster: I really hope
this Contact Centre issue is a historic problem. CMS3, I understand,
is coming this week. Incidentally, on CMS, before we leave it,
the problem was the screens just went blank—I have sat behind
people and seen them go blank—so the idea that it was just
a blip is nonsense. We are going to hear more about that anyway.
What I really want to ask about is for the future. Do you now
have the resources to make sure these Contact Centres work? I
put to you this figure: I was told from an internal memo in the
Hastings centre that there was a capacity for 2,000 calls (I do
not know whether that is a day or a week) but the actual numbers
coming in were 8,000. So it was planned to fail. Are you now in
a position to say that your schemes are planned to work?
Mr Bone: Yes, we are. I think,
probably, part of the reason you may have seen the figure of 8,000
calls received was because, as Lesley was pointing out, people
were not getting through so you were getting repeat calls coming
in, and each one of those repeat calls is registered as a call
to the centre. In fact, what we have got from the statistics from
our switches in the call centres are that since we put our action
plan in place, since that problem in late August/early September,
the number of calls to the call centres has reduced, as we are
answering those and people are not calling back.
Q74 Michael Foster: The reason for
that, first of all, is that the redial option is not the answer
because that does not even get recorded, because the redial only
happens if you actually get through, so that is not part of it.
The reason that you are now coping is because you are doing it
clerically. That is the reason you are coping in areas like Hastings—the
only reason you are coping. Can you give me an assurance that
you will not abandon the clerical options until you are absolutely
satisfied that the Contact Centres are working efficiently?
Ms Strathie: Absolutely. We can
guarantee we will not abandon any option that delivers service
to the customer where we build this capability. That has been
part of our learning. I can give you that guarantee.
Q75 Michael Foster: So the sort of
eight-week period before you get an interview is a thing of the
past and will never happen again. Is that right?
Ms Strathie: I sincerely hope
so. I was appalled, when I was talking about earlier in the summer,
when I found out some of the dates that people were being given
to make their claim. I sincerely hope that is something we do
not live through again. What I do want your appreciation of, though,
is that we are only halfway there; we are only halfway to building
this. We have to do it in a way the private sector would not;
we have to do it by temporary staff, by seat-warming, until other
staff become free and we move them. We have to train people to
do a job that was not the job they were joined to do. So this
is not like I am straight, we have sorted the problems and it
is there. We are building the other half of the Contact Centre
Network and capability.
Q76 Michael Foster: I am an optimist.
Ms Strathie: Thank you.
Q77 Chairman: I think we have come
to the end of our time. We do have three or four further questions
we would like an answer to, in writing, if you can. In closing
can I ask you: assuming we invite you back in 12 months' time,
what is the one thing you want to have achieved in those 12 months?
Ms Strathie: I want my customers
to be saying: "Is it now so much easier to make a claim for
benefit and get help into work than it used to be?"
Chairman: Thank you very much.
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