DATA reveals nearly half of council customers are not getting their calls answered when they contact Slough Borough Council.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of calls, the council’s call centre received from April 2021 to May 2022, around fifty per cent of those contacts were answered.

From January 2022 to May, the council received 83,404 calls but only 43 per cent (35,869) were picked up.

In contrast, from April 2020 to March 2021, the local authority answered 159,388 out of 207,332 calls with a total of around 54 full-time staff to help achieve the answer rate of 76.9 per cent.

Slough Observer:

That rate has sharply decreased between April 2021 to March 2022 to 50.8 per cent.

Council bosses blame the lack of resources and the dependency of interim staff, who need to be re-trained. The failed ‘Our Futures’ programme, which sought to shift some of the council’s operations to digital, downsized the customer service team.

However, this change was not based on robust evidence and made very little progress in swapping the local authority to digital.

The report stated: “It was clear that the service did not achieve the transformation that was intended. The service experienced a greater demand level, high waiting times and an increase in complaints resulted.”

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Slough Borough Council’s call centre takes queries via telephone and email regarding a multitude of operations, such as council tax, blue badge applications, Osborne housing repairs, and concessionary bus passes.

It was based in Landmark Place, which is set to be converted into flats, but moved the team into the council’s headquarters Observatory House.

The average waiting time has also sharply risen from three minutes and 27 seconds in 2020/21 to 14 minutes and 30 seconds.

The Slough Observer asked people how long they were left on hold when contacting the council. Most residents said they were on the phone for hours to reach someone about housing repairs or council tax.

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One woman said she was on the phone for three hours and eventually gave up whereas another person said they called 15 times and each attempt lasted from 45 minutes to an hour and a half.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service contacted the call centre and was left on hold for about 10 minutes, below the average waiting time.

Council bosses say they are planning to restructure its customer service team to make sure it has enough resources and capacity to make improvements within the council’s financial envelope.

The service’s current processes are to be reviewed to see what else needs improving. Alongside this, the digital transformation is to be re-visited.

Councillors are to hear the call centre update report at a customer and community scrutiny meeting on Wednesday, July 6.