Key Statistics

200k

Citizens

75

Contact Centre Agents

350k

Calls Per Year

2,500

Back Office Staff

About Luton Borough Council

Luton, just 30 miles North West of London, is one of the country’s most populous towns without city status. It is an ethnically diverse area which has faced challenges after the loss of Vauxhall car manufacturing in 2002.

Its revenue support grant from central government has reduced dramatically. In 2010 it was £110 million and is expected to be around £8 million in 2020.

Despite these challenges Luton Borough Council is committed to putting the needs of its citizens at the heart of everything it does, and to building a sustainable organisation that is able to support them.

The call centre provides twenty six different front line services and receives over 350,000 calls a year, handled by 75 contact centre staff, with another 2450 back office staff.

FourNet have worked as a true partner. They are flexible in their approach and proactive and have worked hard to find a solution to any problems we might have. I am very happy that we chose FourNet

Robin Porter

Corporate Director, Commercial and Transformation Services, Luton Borough Council

Challenges

  • Aging telephony estate and contact centre platforms
  • Wanted SIP enablement to simplify and modernise communications infrastructure
  • Improve services to public and staff, via automated services and additional channels
  • Reduce technology hardware footprint by migrating IT services into data centres in Luton and Manchester.
  • Aiming for cost efficiencies through reduced power consumption and centralised management and administration, and rationalisation of costly ISDN services

Solution

Upgrade to Avaya Aura bringing Unified Communication, Colloboration and much more.

  • State of the Art Contact Centre improving efficiency and customer satisfaction
  • Upgrade to Avaya Aura brings Unified Comms and more
  • Better quality customer interactions and fairer assessment for agents via Workforce Optimisation
  • SIP trunking brings increased resilience and reduced costs

The solution has given us three clear benefits. First around cost savings and efficiencies, we now have the ability to gear up at short notice to deliver new commercial contracts, which is very important to us. As a result of the new system and our ability to be able to resource plan, we can now improve customer service to ensure that consistently high quality advice is given, with a better right first time resolution.

Sue Nelson
Services Director, Revenues and Customer Service, Luton Borough Council

We can now automate business processes and improve the flow so that they can now process emails at the same time as they answer calls. Speech recognition combined with traditional IVT has allowed us to seamlessly get customers to the right place first time.

Helen Lunn
Business Analyst, Customer Transformation Programmes, Luton Borough Council