Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, , 6:50:30 to 6:53:31
Discussion of the National Contact Centre's performance metrics, including call volumes and response times, alongside the launch of the First Nations Connect dedicated phone service.
Topics: First Nations, Government IT systems
Speakers: Scott McNaughton, Ellie Whiteaker
Thank you. That was very thorough, and you preempted my follow-up question, which was what's changing to fix it. So thank you. Just a couple of final questions from me before I pass the call to Senator Ruston. I've got some questions about the National Contact Centre. Thank you. Can you talk us through the role that the National Contact Centre plays in communication between the NDIA and participants? Why it's important that it delivers good customer service for participants. And if you can just give me a sense of the volume that's coming through the contact centre on average each week.
We take around 60,000 phone calls and emails combined per week. Our average service standard at the moment is to answer all the average answer for the average speed of answer is currently 56 seconds.
Wow.
So that's pretty good for our government contact centre. So we're really pleased with that. Okay. And we also process those emails within two days at 96% of the time. So that's been really important for us. Over the past two years, we've had a program called first contact resolution, where we've tried to do more because we now have more APS delegates in our contact centre. We're able to do more tasks at first contact resolution. So last year we were able to resolve 320,000 first contact resolution tasks, which is a really important output and outcome for participants and providers. We've also recently launched a new initiative called our First Nations Connect, which is a dedicated phone service for our First Nations providers and participants and intermediaries staffed by either First Nations staff or staff who have been trained in cultural awareness and cultural safety. And that's a really important initiative.
Well done to the team. Those are some very impressive numbers from our call centre. Thank you. Senator Ruston, back to you.