Cleaned-Up Visibility

When a platform switch left the City of Tampa Solid Waste Department (SWD) with no visibility into its call center activity, the When a platform switch left the City of Tampa Solid Waste Department (SWD) with no visibility into its call center activity, the department realized it needed to do some in-house disposal. The SWD, which provides refuse collection, disposal, and recycling services for more than 80,000 residential and commercial customers, and handles complaints and queries about its services, used a 15-year-old DOS-based ACD system to help operate its call center. "It worked as an ACD system without any problem," says Varghese Jacob, the SWD's deputy director of administration and finance. But as a result of the city's conversion to the Windows platform, the SWD couldn't get any reports on vital call center metrics like incoming call volume and call answer rate. The department estimated its actual daily call volume at 350, but its system could handle just 150 calls per day; it started receiving complaints from callers unable to get through, with some complaints landing in the mayor's office. The department switched to the hosted version of Cincom Systems's Synchrony, a multichannel contact center and unified agent desktop solution, and went live with the deployment in October 2005. Synchrony provides the department with automatic screen pops of customer data and history, the ability to track and assign complaints, and reports four times a day that itemize specific complaints in different geographies, resulting in problem-resolution times of under three hours. SWD can track call volume, agent activity, and overall center performance. For instance, the SWD now knows that its actual volume is usually between 450 and 550 daily, and has seen its agents go from answering between 40 and 50 daily calls to answering between 70 and 100 daily calls. "The main benefit is we can see what's going on," Jacob says. "We set up benchmarks for customer service, and everybody has tried to get to [them]. That naturally increases our productivity."