The paper uses an evaluation of the quality of service in Stirling Council's contact centre, together with surveys of 30 of Scotland's 32 local authorities, to determine what is best practice in a public sector call centre environment and create a proposed framework for evaluation of call centres.

The aims of the study, which was carried out in 2006 and published in the journal Managing Service Quality in 2008, were:

• to identify the number of Scottish local authorities using contact centres to deliver front line services
• to gather evidence on whether Stirling Council's contact centre is quantitative, qualitative or a combination of both
• to evaluate the service delivered to internal customers by the contact centre
• to offer recommendations on the way forward.

Among the key findings of the study that relate to Scottish local government as a whole are:

• At the time of the study, 17 councils had a contact centre with a further six intending to establish one in the coming year.
• All local authorities with a contact centre delivered it in-house in preference to in partnership with another agency or outsourcing.
• The most common service delivered via contact centres is waste services (22%) followed by pest control (17%), roads (16%) and council tax (11%).
• 57% of contact centres communicated with services by email; 43% through the internet.
• 13 of the 17 local authorities with a contact centre used mainly customer complaints to monitor service quality. Other popular quality measures included the number of calls passed to services, politeness, responsive call handling times and benchmarking.
• 24% of councils thought resolution at the first point of contact was the main benefit of the contact centre, followed by consistency of approach (19%).
• In the Stirling Council study, 83% of problems with customers stemmed from repeat calls, where complete service had not been received.

The document provides a conceptual model for the public sector call centre and a proposed framework to evaluate best practice.

The full paper is available to purchase online at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do?contentType=Article&contentId=1714602