Service NSW to make its contact centre operations 'geographically agnostic'

Service NSW is on the cusp of restructuring its contact centre operations to be “geographically agnostic”, believing the “old-school” contact centre model is expired.

Transformation manager Kiran Dhanasar told the Genesys G-Summit ANZ 2021 virtual conference that the agency’s contact centre now had “over 2000 staff members” responding to over 75,000 calls per day.

The agency had already “moved [its] workforce to be a predominately work-from-home workforce in the last couple of years,” Dhanasar said.

But it is settling on a longer-term operating model that will ultimately let staff choose where they work from, what shifts they take, and even their areas of subject matter and internal specialisation.

“What I’d love to do - and what we’re working towards in the contact centre in Service NSW - is being a geographically agnostic contact centre, where our staff members can choose to work-from-home but if a work-from-home environment doesn’t suit them they can choose one of our contact centre locations to move to and bring their devices into those workstations, log in, and perform their day from there,” Dhanasar said.

“We’re pretty close to having that system up and running.”

Service NSW revealed earlier this year that it is using a Genesys Cloud CX platform to handle calls, texts and email inquiries from NSW citizens.

Dhanasar said that key performance metrics and the centre’s workforce management systems were also undergoing changes.

“We’re changing things like our performance indicators to be outcome oriented rather than the old-school average handle times etc,” he said.

“We’re changing our workforce management systems to be much more flexible and allow staff members to choose their shifts.

“We’ve found that the traditional, very strictly rostered contact centre is becoming a thing of the past, as we need to accommodate people balancing their work and their lives throughout a period of incredible change.”

Further transformation efforts focused on helping staff to become subject matter experts in their chosen internal areas of interest, and providing them with learning resources, tools and time to develop that expertise.

Dhanasar said that the agency had been able to handle increased support needs in part by bringing in staff from its shopfronts to handle calls and web chats instead.

He also said that customer service staff from Covid-hit industries such as travel, tourism and hospitality had joined Service NSW.