How the Northumbria 101 system works
We have produced a pdf file of how the sytem works which has a diagram and the information below as one document, which you may find useful. However, the process is as follows...
Customers dial 101 from a landline or mobile phone.
The call goes to Cable & Wireless who can tell where the call is coming from – either by the dialing code or the mobile phone mast. It is then directed to one of the Call Taking Partners. (The partners who have agreed to pick up 101 calls in their contact centres).
If the system cannot tell where a call is coming from, it gets put through to a Cable & Wireless operator who will check the customer is in a 101 area.
One of the main advantages of the Northumbria 101 model is that we can add new Call Taking Partners really easily. The 101 system is web-based and is easy to access using the internet after training and the proper telephony equipment is in place, so if an organisation wants to begin taking 101 calls it can be added to the system.
Calls are answered by a highly trained 101 Adviser. Advisers log on using high security tokens, which makes sure that no untrained staff or anyone else can get access.
Once all the details have been taken and the Adviser is sure it is a service we can help with through 101, they ‘request a service’.
This request is sent electronically to a Service Delivery Partner – one of the 14 organisations who actually provide the services. When a service request is received by a Service Delivery Partner, it falls into a queue. Local Service Managers monitor the queue and, as requests come in, they send them using their own processes through to the right department who will carry out the service.
Some partners are planning to use the 101 system to manage work within their own organisation directly, cutting out their own back-office systems.
Soon individual front-line staff will also be able to use Personal Digital Systems (PDAs) or Smart Phones to log on to the 101 system directly. They will be able to pick up jobs over the internet, direct from 101 Advisers and so will be able to respond even quicker to a service request from a customer.
This electronic transfer of information is managed through one of our two Data Centres in Scotland.
The centres also store all the information from the 101 system, which in turn gives us our performance data. We have a second Data Centre for disaster recovery and business continuity – so if anything happens to the main Centre, the secondary site has copies of all the information and could continue business as usual.
Because we have more than one Call Taking Partner, we can make sure that calls are re-routed to another of our Call Taking Partners without losing the 101 service all together if there is a problem at one of the centres.
If the main Cable & Wireless service fails we have emergency 0800 numbers for customers.
Customers can also log comments and complaints about the system by calling 101 or by using the 101 website. These go direct to the Operations Management team to deal with.
The whole system is very accessible, flexible and easy to add information to. Both Advisers and Local Service Managers can monitor progress of work, pull off reports relevant to their own organisation and add notes, so if a customer calls back the Adviser can update them on progress.