ACF Improves Operational Efficiency for Portsmouth City Council

Portsmouth City Council is a local authority located in the port city of Portsmouth, Hampshire, on the south coast of the UK. It is a unitary authority, having the powers of a non-metropolitan county and district council combined. The council supports its 230,000+ person community with a wide range of public services from the service center in the heart of town, directly opposite the Portsmouth Guildhall.

The Challenge

Portsmouth City Council, being a unitary authority supporting a densely populated community, experienced high demand at its service centre during peak hours, resulting in increased wait times.

With consistently high footfall combined with natural peaks and troughs, the council faced rising wait times and challenges in maintaining its desired level of customer service.

Additional pressure was created by a lack of clear expectations for customers regarding their wait time and position in the queue.

There was also a need to manage multiple queues served by dedicated teams across the service centre, which was difficult to achieve efficiently without an automated calling system.

The Solution

ACF worked with the Portsmouth City Council service centre management team to design and implement an advanced queue management solution using the Q-Flow software platform, achieving the following key goals:

Enable customers to self-join a queue using kiosks by selecting the service they require.
Provide printed tickets to assign each customer a unique queue number.
Inform customers of their queue position through branded digital signage.
Use audio announcements to call customers forward and direct them to the correct service desk.
Empower staff to efficiently route customers between services as needed.

Portsmouth City Council building exterior.

Welcome kiosk and printed tickets

Multiple kiosks are added near the service center entrance to capture all walk-in customers and help them join a queue. The customer is provided with a printed ticket with a unique queue number e.g. 'CS 101 '. This sets the expectation and gives the customer a feeling of a personal ticket number. The kiosk screen is dynamic and branded to the look and feel of the Council. In addition, for the purpose of tracking all quick query interactions, a reception desk agent can simply select a reason for any quick visit from a list of options.

Digital signage screens

Whilst the customers are waiting, there are multiple digital signage screens around the service center that allow the customers to see their progress by tracking their unique queue number. The screen designs are fully aligned to the Council branding and also show other information such as service and news updates.

Customer service team user interface

The customer service staff have been empowered with the Q-Flow web-based user interface which is simple-to-use, yet functionality rich. Staff were upskilled on how they could perform such tasks as: Viewing all waiting customers and the services they came in for. Classify the outcomes of each customer interaction. See the live wait times for each customer. The ability to call customers forward with a single click with the system prioritizing the order automatically. Having the ability to take action on customers that have been waiting a long time. The ability to call customers forward with a single click with the system prioritizing the order automatically.

Management user interface

The service center managers are able to: See a real-time view of all waiting customers across all queues. See the current expected wait time for each customer. Take immediate actions to move customers between queues or open new queues. View a series of past, present and future predictive reports. Send key communications and messages to users within the application.

Local hosting

The solution is hosted locally on the Portsmouth City Council's servers making for a quick installation and simple local environment support if required.

The Results

Portsmouth City Council service centre using ACF Q-Flow queue management system to improve operational efficiency and customer service delivery.

The advanced queue management system provided by ACF allows us to effectively manage our customers to provide the customer service excellence we committed to delivering. In addition to this, the system provides comprehensive reporting abilities to allow us to analyze our performance, identify peak contact times and efficiently plan staff resource to meet both our service commitments and business demands.

Nina Martin
City Helpdesk Manager