Devonport City Council gets instant customer satisfaction insights with Dubber

Devonport City Council turned to Dubber’s call recording and voice AI to get insights to improve staff training, boost customer service, and track customer satisfaction on every call.

Here’s the backstory

Devonport City Council found Dubber when it needed help understanding customer satisfaction.

The council serves a city of 26,000 people on Tasmania’s north coast.

There’s a team of seven customer service staff who handle all the calls arriving at the council. They can deal with queries themselves or pass calls on to other council departments.

The team deals with a wide range of calls including parking, animal control, rates, and health matters. It also handles calls from developers and builders, along with requests for services such as fixing potholes in local roads.

Customer Services Coordinator Danielle Harvey says the council wanted to know if callers were happy with the service they got, but didn’t want to ask them to stay on the line for an automated survey.

In the past without call recording, they only had anecdotal evidence of customer satisfaction. “We didn’t even have any statistics on how many calls a day we had. I couldn’t tell the busiest time of day or day of the week”

What was the solution?

The council uses Telstra’s IP telephony (TIPT) service and asked the telco for help. It suggested Dubber, which is able to record every call then provide full analytics.

It took next to no time to set up Dubber to record all the council’s incoming calls. The council then added voice AI analytics to transcribe and measure the sentiment of every call.

What were the results?

Improved Staff Training

The council uses Dubber to improve staff training and the way calls are handled. Harvey says in the past training involved her sitting beside the team to hear their side of conversations. “When you are working alongside someone you might not hear their tone and manner. With Dubber I can sit in a quiet room, listen to both sides and hear the tone and manner. It’s very useful”.

Harvey takes a subtle approach with staff feedback. She says the customer service team are not keen on being recorded and do not like being told after a call what they should have said.

Instead, she listens to a select number of calls each week and, based on what she hears, makes general suggestions to all staff members during meetings.

She says: “I simply say something like: did you realise we have these parking permits? If anyone asks about parking you can give them this information.”

At the same time, she asks staff to identify calls they think she should listen to. This can be when someone asks a difficult question or maybe when the caller feels they didn’t get a full enough answer. Harvey can simply and quickly search for the call using a phone number.

“Dubber has been the next level for customer service performance and we now have more structure in our training. Dubber is filling in the gaps in knowledge”.

Feedback for other departments

One area where she found Dubber helpful is with setting up questions for data collection. A council department might give the customer service team a series of questions to ask callers to gather more information. In cases, the customer service team understands these might not be the best questions.

By being able to go back to the departments with recordings of calls, they are able to identify where they might improve their questions to get the right answers from callers.

Customer Satisfaction Monitoring

The sentiment rating instantly measures if a call is happy, unhappy or neutral and quickly gives pointers to the calls that may need closer examination. Transcripts are helpful for a quick overview, because listening to recordings takes more time. Harvey says she also finds transcripts handy when it comes to sharing information with other council managers.

The council’s next step will be using Dubber’s automation and sentiment analysis to set up dashboards. That way managers can log-in and get an instant overview of customer satisfaction. They can see how customers are responding, how many calls are coming in, and how long each call takes.