Is your customer contact centre budget solving the problem or hiding it?
When an Authority assumes responsibility for customer contact, a call centre can look like the obvious answer. It is worth testing the demand before that assumption becomes a fixed cost.
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An Authority moving to franchising or strengthening an Enhanced Partnership may take on more responsibility for the passenger relationship. This can include a network-wide route for complaints, lost property, disruption enquiries and feedback. The first budget often begins with desks, telephony and an assumed volume of calls. It should begin with the reasons people need to make contact.
Some contact is inevitable. A passenger whose last bus has been cancelled or whose concessionary ticket has stopped working needs help with the immediate problem. Other contact exposes a service gap: an unclear refund process, real-time information that fails to explain a diversion, or a lost-property process that gives no confirmation. Adding Advisors may protect the response-time target while leaving the cause unaddressed.
Count resolved work, not just channel volumes
No universal cost benchmark applies across telephone, webchat and online-form channels. Cost depends on local conditions: the type of enquiry, the hand-off to an Operator or Supplier, the systems an Advisor must consult and the follow-up required. A written enquiry may cost more than a call if it prompts several exchanges. Webchat can be more convenient for passengers and easier to record, yet it still takes Advisor time.
Savings arise when passengers can complete a defined task themselves and receive enough reassurance not to chase it. This could mean submitting a lost-property report and receiving a reference number, tracking the progress of a complaint or finding a clear answer about a diversion. Simply placing a chat window in front of an existing telephone process does not achieve this.
A useful measure is the completion rate for each defined self-service task.
Interpret this measure carefully. A high completion rate does not establish that the passenger’s underlying issue has been resolved. A low rate may indicate that the task is poorly explained, unsuitable for the circumstance or started by people who are not eligible. The Authority should compare the figure with repeat-contact data and review a small sample of real cases.
Do not let answer time carry the whole story
Speed of answer matters, particularly during disruption. It says little about whether contact was avoidable or a passenger had to return later. In design reviews, we have seen green answer-time reports hide a problem elsewhere: the same matter arrives through several channels because no one owns its resolution.
Management information should follow each contact from reason to outcome. Record the reason consistently across phone, email, form and social channels. Identify cases settled at first contact, transferred to an Operator or Supplier, or returned within an agreed period. Assign recurring causes to the teams able to act on them: a fare rule to the ticketing team, a missed stop announcement to the Operator and a misleading disruption message to the information Supplier.
Define “First-contact resolution” in the performance schedule so all parties use it consistently. For a lost-property query, closure can mean acknowledgement and a reference number. For a complaint, an acknowledgement alone is insufficient. The Authority needs an agreed status, a named owner and a way to identify a related repeat contact.
Report cost per resolved case alongside cost per incoming contact. The distinction matters when an inexpensive digital form creates a queue for manual investigation or a short telephone call prevents further correspondence. Review separately the passengers who need assisted support. A digital saving that leaves them unable to complete the task is a service failure.
Put the evidence into the operating arrangements
Contracts and data arrangements need the same scrutiny as the contact centre. The Authority should be able to see underlying case data and contact reasons, not only a monthly summary from a contact-centre provider. Where an Operator is responsible for the remedy, the hand-off, response deadline and closure evidence must be clear. If they are unclear, cases can drift between the Authority, Operator and Supplier while each reports that it met its own target.
Our LiteFranchise™ material includes digital-adoption targets in its KPI Register and describes OneContact as bringing together enquiries, feedback, complaints and lost property. These components require locally agreed definitions, auditable source data and a review of the passenger journeys that generate the most contact. A KPI is useful only when the case records support it.
Useful questions
Before approving the contact-centre budget, ask the team for evidence on demand rather than assumptions about channels.
- What are the ten most common reasons passengers contact us and which of them are genuinely avoidable?
- For each digital task, how many passengers start, complete and then make a related contact within the agreed follow-up period?
- What does a resolved case cost once Advisor time, transfers, rework and Supplier handling are included?
- Can we trace a disruption, ticketing or complaint case across the Authority, Operator and Supplier to a documented outcome?
- Which passengers need assisted support and is that support available when and where they need it?
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