Lake Macquarie City Council’s customer service team has logged more than 150,000 residential requests in the past 12 months.
Topping the list were waste, rates and building enquiries, dealt with in phone calls, emails, over-the-counter transactions and via social media.
An average of 590 customer service tasks have been logged every business day since 1 July, 2021.
The council’s call centre operators dealt with almost 116,000 calls across the 12 months, with waste enquiries such as missed bins, calls to pay rates and building and development application enquiries the most common topics covered.
The volume of telephone calls however are trending downward, says director organisational services Melissa Rowe, as residents increasingly switch to social media, or self-service options on council’s website.
“We’ve made a lot more of our services available online, so customers can self-serve 24 hours a day rather than needing to contact our Customer Service Centre during business hours,” she said.
“That means customers can process their transactions quicker and allows staff working in our call centre to concentrate on more complex transactions and issues.”
Customer service staff fielded more than 1,800 social media enquiries and processed 30,600 customer emails in the past 12 months.
The team also dealt with 6,022 walk-in enquiries – fewer than half the volume recorded pre-pandemic.
“Those numbers are down significantly, but it’s important to note that our face-to-face service remained open to the public throughout the pandemic to ensure our most vulnerable customers could still access the services they required,” Ms Rowe said.
Lake Macquarie City mayor Kay Fraser said customer service was often a thankless and challenging task.
“Our officers are on the frontline when dealing with complicated and controversial topics,” she said.
“But, I’m incredibly proud of how they deal efficiently and professionally with such a high volume of enquiries every day.”
A new call-back service introduced in March, where an automated system remembers a caller’s place in a queue, then calls them back without them having to wait on hold, has also proved successful.
Ms Rowe said more than 4,000 callers had opted for the call-back rather than sit on hold.
Also popular was a pilot program providing common customer service transactions such as rates payments, animal registrations and kitchen green waste caddy purchases at Morisset Library.
There are plans to extend the trial to other Lake Mac Libraries branches in coming months.
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