8×8 Accelerates Contact Center Deployment for Sefton Council in Just Ten Days to Transform Citizen Services

8×8, Inc., a leading integrated cloud communications platform, announced that Sefton Council, the governing body for the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton in Merseyside, rapidly deployed the 8×8 Contact Center in just ten days to transform citizen service in the face of the global health crisis.

Sefton Council is the governing body for the metropolitan borough of Sefton in Merseyside, north-western England. It employs over 3,000 staff and provides essential services to 275,000 citizens across the borough. With a focus on enhancing citizen services, the local authority was planning to replace its aging contact center technology at the beginning of this year. However, with the sudden government directive to shelter-in-place in March, the council had to act swiftly to maintain vital services as agents were no longer able to safely work from the contact center.

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Following expert advice from its trusted ICT and helpdesk partner, Agilisys, Sefton Council selected the 8×8 Contact Centre from the Crown Commercial Service’s G-Cloud procurement framework. The capabilities allowed agents to connect across voice, video, and chat, and to effectively support secure credit card processing. Working to extremely tight timescales, 8×8 enabled 40 contact center agents to work remotely in just ten days – a process that would have typically taken 3 months in the public sector arena.

James Aldred, Sefton Council Procurement Manager, said, “I remember arriving at 7 a.m. to an email that said we needed to create a virtual contact centre, immediately. Within hours, the project team found the right solution and got a deal together which fully met our commercial and service requirements.”

Mark Quillan, Sefton Council Customer Service Manager, added, “8×8 did all they could to make this a positive experience for us and we achieved our objectives exceptionally quickly. Implementing a cloud contact center solution would typically take three months in the public sector arena. Instead, it took just ten days.”

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A few weeks following the initial deployment, the council rolled out several advanced platform features, such as skills-based routing, speech analytics, and post-call survey. This enabled complete visibility and tracking of the customer experience, and quick first contact resolution. Furthermore, remote agents will be able to take secure card payments from citizens in the coming weeks, utilizing fully PCI compliant 8×8 Secure Pay functionality.

Jamie Snaddon, Managing Director, EMEA at 8×8, said, “We are extremely proud to support Sefton Council transform its citizen services with the rapid deployment of the 8×8 Open Communications Platform. We look forward to helping them improve their agility, and enabling their agents to safely work from anywhere.”

8×8 Contact Centre, also available as part of 8×8 X Series, is a complete solution including ACD, IVR, digital channels, outbound dialer, reporting, customer experience analytics, quality management, speech analytics, customer surveys, and knowledgebase, all delivered on one unified, a secure and reliable platform featuring single sign-on and centralized administration. Pre-built CRM integrations make it easy for agents to access and view customer data.

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