The New Normal – virtual contact centre for Citizens Advice Bureau

[Simon Davison]

At the beginning of the virus lockdown, Sutton CAB had a problem of how to keep their contact centre up and running.

CEO Steve Triner asked the contact centre staff if they would be prepared to work from home taking calls on their mobile phones.  Most of the contact centre staff are volunteers.

This plan immediately ran into a problem – the volunteers pointed out that they often had to make outgoing calls and they were not happy for their clients to see their personal (07) mobile numbers, nor did they want to be using their call minutes allowances for CAB calls.

We deployed a solution which solved all of the issues – with an app that takes just a few minutes to install and configure on mobiles, they can manage their availability in the contact centre queues, hide their outgoing 07 number and have the call costs borne by CAB, not by the volunteers.

The Work-From-Home Contact Centre was fully up and running the same day, and crucially, the change was made with no down-time at all.

Quote from Steve Triner, Sutton Citizens Advice Bureau CEO:

“it was crucial that we kept our service running without interruption. Revolution Phones transitioned us from a contact centre with everyone working in one office to a system where everyone could work from home, with no interruption to our service. In fact, our clients would have been completely unaware of the transition – from the public point of view, we are providing exactly the same service.”