Borough of Poole is undertaking a two-month trial of standard opening hours for all services supported by the Customer Services Centre in January and February 2010, with a view to improving overall efficiency and customer service.
Most services are available by phone and email during the "normal" council opening times of 8.30am – 5.15pm Monday to Friday and 8.30am – 4.45pm on Fridays. However, support for Environmental and Consumer Protection, Transportation, Leisure and Libraries has been operating between 8am – 6pm daily for several years. A very small number of calls and emails are received outside of core hours for these services, as growing numbers of customers now chose to deal with the council online instead, with website services available 24 hours a day.
Chris Owens, Head of Customer Services and Communications, Borough of Poole, said: "The Customer Services Centre receives just 3% of calls during its extended opening hours and we’ve decided to trial normal hours instead. Borough of Poole anticipates being able to deliver an improved service overall to customers by being able to better deploy our staff where they are most needed. Short-term, calls to libraries will also be unaffected after we close in the late afternoon, as we’ll automatically reroute calls through to those libraries that are still open. The original hours will be re-instated for all affected services from 1 March 2010 while the results of the trial and customer feedback are assessed."
Customers who call outside our new opening hours will hear our usual ‘out of hours’ message and will be signposted to the website www.boroughofpoole.com. The council’s emergency ‘out of hours’ service 0800 506050 remains entirely unaffected.
