Hinchinbrook Shire Council uses Dubber Call Recording to end “he said, she said” disputes

Many of the people who deal with Hinchinbrook Shire Council are not comfortable with connecting online. “That means they are more likely to use their phones to contact the council than go through online channels”, says Emma Prior, the council’s administration services team leader. **

“We use Dubber Call Recording for our main customer service centre. Our rates team and the regulatory compliance team also all have their phones recorded. We use the recording to deal with contentious issues – we get a lot of ‘he said, she said’ with our customers. We use the recordings to back us up.”

She says the move to call recording came from when the council would do rates debt collection.

“Part of our process is to place reminder calls to home owners. But people would deny they were called or claim that they had missed the call and there wasn’t a message.

“Now we can say: hang on, we have this recording to show that we did speak to you or leave a message on a particular date. That was the driver for getting recordings in the first place, from there we have gone on to use it in other areas.”

Prior’s team deals with a variety of calls. “Rates are the main ones, then there are roads, animals and cemetery enquiries. Hinchinbrook also handles food licensing. We get all sorts of things, we field things that aren’t even council matters.”

Information services manager Steven Veltmeyer says there are 20 Dubber Cloud Call Recording licences at the council.

He says; “Until now we have operated as separate divisions, but we are in the process of centralising all incoming calls to go through our main customer service centre. Now that we are rolling out Microsoft Teams, it will be easier to keep control of these calls”.

Hinchinbrook Shire Council was the first council in Queensland to roll-out Microsoft Teams as its sole solution and the first in the state to use Dubber Cloud Call Recording on Teams.