Are your Residents Prepared for the Christmas Period?
With just over a week to go until the main event, there’s not many working days left to ensure all your residents’ seasonal enquiries are fully answered.
Due to the bank holidays regular refuse collection dates may get altered. For those whose Christmas trees have seen better days or who will receive large gifts that has a lot of packaging, residents may need to know when their local recycling centre will be open during the festive period. Many residents will be welcoming visitors over Christmas; therefore they may need to obtain additional parking permits which they may need help with.
Councils need to make it easy for residents to have access to this information, especially if their offices will be closed over the main Christmas period. It can be too demanding on resources to print and post every piece of information that residents may require for the time of year, therefore local authorities should ensure only the vital details are posted which improves the chance of more residents seeing it, such as changes to refuse collection dates. This should also be easily available on their website alongside how to apply for additional parking permits, recycling centre opening times or arranging for the council to collect items.
For customer service teams who may be operating with skeleton staff, having live chat on website is a great way to handle these types of enquiries before they leave for the holidays. Representatives are able to handle multiple enquiries at any one time, helping them to cover the workload and their absent colleagues.
In its available status, live chat on website connects a visitor in real time to a representative to have their questions answered via text based messages. When the instant communication channel is unavailable, there is the option for residents to leave their details, submitting the complete enquiry to a designated email address. In some organisations this will be sent to a mailbox that is monitored out of hours, therefore any urgent enquiries can be quickly sorted out.
If during the Christmas period the office is fully closed with no communication channel being monitored, councils can continue to signpost residents on their website with the use of promotions.
Councils use promotions to display their most important information directly in front of their website visitors. This is an image that appears based on rules such as, the resident has been on the website for a set amount of time, they have browsed a specific page or series of pages etc. When clicked the individual is automatically redirected to the associated URL.
This is useful as over the Christmas period councils could set up a promotion that presents on their refuse collection page(s) after 30 seconds, for example, the image could display that if the residents are expecting too much household waste they can take a look at the recycling centre opening times.
By clicking the promotion, the page relating to the recycling centre opening times can open automatically in the resident’s browser. This allows the website to work smarter, assisting online visitors without representatives having to be present.
Whether your representatives are available or on annual leave for the Christmas holidays, the Click4Assistance engagement tools helps aid your visitors in the most efficient and prompt manner 24/7. We have been supplying live chat for over 10 years with our local authority customers including Sunderland City, Buckinghamshire County and Dorset for You councils.
For more information on how the Click4Assistance solution can benefit your council and residents, book your free demonstration with our Local Authority Co-ordinator by calling 01268 524 628 or email theteam@click4assistance.co.uk.
