Callers to council tax helpline face 23-minute wait

Nicholas Thomas, local democracy reporter

Callers to a council’s phone service for council tax enquiries are typically spending more than 23 minutes on hold.

New figures show Newport City Council has missed waiting time targets for its council tax phone service, its main contact centre, and its Welsh-language line.

The figures have been called “disappointing” and “particularly high” by councillors, while another critic said employing more call handlers could help cut waiting times.

Target

Figures for this financial year, to date, show callers to the council tax enquiries line wait 23 minutes and 26 seconds on average – the highest wait times recorded in the past three years.

That’s against a 20-minute target, and is up from 17 minutes and 35 seconds last year.

Callers to the customer contact centre are waiting an average of 6 minutes and 17 seconds this year – well above the council’s five-minute target but around a minute less than last year.

Residents calling the council’s Welsh-language enquiry line are waiting, on average, five minutes and 21 seconds this year.

That’s slightly outside the five-minute target but more than two minutes longer than callers waited last year.

The figures were discussed at a council scrutiny meeting on Monday.

‘Going backwards’

Cllr Mark Howells, chairing the meeting, said the waiting times were “going backwards, not forwards, which is disappointing”.

He also said the council’s own targets could be more ambitious.

“I just don’t think they’re good enough, and we should target much better than that,” he said.

“Are we just setting the bar way too low for ourselves in saying we’ll take 20 minutes before we can answer your query on council tax, and five minutes to answer the phone generally?”

A council officer told the meeting some tax cases could be “quite complex” and require call handlers to seek advice from back-office staff.

A new telephony system will soon be introduced and help staff “do more with call handling”, she explained, adding that the council “should start to see big improvements”.

Cllr Dimitri Batrouni, who leads the city council, acknowledged residents’ “frustration”, and said the organisation was on a “journey of improvement”, including a £320,000 investment in customer services.

Rhys Cornwall, the council’s head of transformation, added it would “stand to reason the length of time for calls would increase” if more straightforward cases were dealt with online – leaving phone staff free to handle more complex issues.

Cllr Chris Reeks said the time residents spend on hold is “particularly high” and suggested the council could play promotional messages about its services or events, rather than simply telling callers they were in a queue.

But the officer said people “get frustrated when hearing lots of messages”, and the council instead wanted to promote its online services to waiting callers, to try and “divert people away from the queue to the website, especially with council tax”.

‘Bums on seats’

Away from the meeting, Conservative campaigner Michael Enea said the council needs “more bums on seats”.

He continued: “The agents working within the council’s contact centre are well trained and execute a great service,” he said. “We just need more of them answering the phone and replying to queries. It’s as simple as that.”

The council said it is “reviewing the skills within the team” dealing with council tax enquiries and “there has been an improvement which will show in the next quarter”.

Staffing levels have also affected the main enquiry line and the Welsh-language phone service, according to the council report.