Environment Agency cleans up with CRM

The Environment Agency is expanding the capabilities of its call centre and extending its use of customer relationship management (CRM) technologies to create an end-to-end view of enquiries from the public.

The government agency built a national call centre in the summer of last year with IBM and is now looking to expand its use.

Liz Buckle, head of customer contact at the Environment Agency, explained: "We identified that we wanted to improve our direct contact with customers. We decided to deliver a national customer call centre to be a front office for the organisation, especially in terms of information requests and licensing and permits.

Enquiry calls from the public can be about anything to do with the environment - from flooding to waste management and recycling. The agency also routes all general email enquires to the call centre, dealing with around 150 emails per day.

Buckle said the national call centre means there is a greater critical mass of people to deal with peak workloads. It also means that technical staff can get on with their jobs without having to answer the phone all the time.

She said: "We are skimming off enquiries and solving them without going to the technical teams, the people who are out inspecting or collecting samples who would [otherwise] have to handle fairly basic enquiries.

The call centre has also built a "knowledge base" which enables it to answer questions faster. "It's still something we put quite a lot of resource into because it is a continually shifting landscape," she added.

Since May this year the call centre has also processed the registration of 180,000 producers of hazardous waste.

"It's complex legislation," said Buckle. "Linked to the registration we've answered thousands of enquiries. We will in future be contributing to the guidance - we'll be feeding back into that."

Next up - 162,000 farmers will have to register for agricultural waste and the call centre will take those registrations too.

The Environment Agency's internal IS helpdesk is also using the same system to run its operations. From the cost and support point of view it's much more efficient than lots of different systems, she added.

The next step is to establish the end-to-end management of customer enquiries when the Oracle CRM is rolled out to external relations teams who deal with written enquiries.

Buckle said: "You might write in with an enquiry and then ring the call centre. We would be able to say where the enquiry is up to."