Contact Centre of the Year 76+- Child Youth & Family
Our thanks to Shane Willoughy at Child Youth & Family for the interview and photos.
1. Congratulations on your win. Child, Youth and Family have a huge responsibility within all our communities. Tell us what role does the contact centre in CFY have in helping with that responsibility, and/or how does the contact centre fit into the CYF strategy?
Helping children and young people grow up free from abuse and neglect and ensure young offenders take responsibility for their actions is certainly a big and important job. The stakes are always high and the public interest in the work we do means our processes are often under the microscope.
The Call Centre itself has a pivotal role to play in helping Child, Youth and Family to meet its responsibilities. 0508 FAMILY is the first point of call for many New Zealanders who have concerns about the safety and wellbeing of children and young people. In fact, we receive over 3500 calls/day. Most of these calls are transferred to our offices throughout New Zealand. Around 250 of these are assessed at the Call Centre. Some of these calls turn out to be advice calls for parents and professionals and others are notifications of a report of concern.
In addition to the calls we receive 70 – 100 reports of concern via fax, e-mail and Mail each day which are also assessed, processed and distributed to our offices across NZ.
The Call Centre has evolved in a way which supports all of the different strands of Child, Youth and Family’s work, ranging from adoptions, to the secure residential facilities we operate for young people, to supporting our frontline social work teams in their day-to-day casework.
Some of the unique projects the Call Centre has introduced recently have included launching a 0508 line for our caregivers (they are a crucial group of carers for children requiring care outside of their homes) to ensure they have timely access to support and advice. We’ve also recently introduced an internal web-based resource to assist social workers to trace family and whanau members.
The Call Centre has embarked on playing a pivotal role in assisting with the Ministry’s key priorities to enhance our relationship with our clients and stakeholders within the community.
2. As part of your winning Award entry, you would have outlined some of your targets -are you able to share some of them with the TUANZ contact centre community. If so, what are they and how do you meet them?
Last year we made some great inroads in reducing our front-end demand allowing us to focus on value-added services to clients.
We aim to build on this over the next year by introducing a self-service voice dial facility for staff. This will enable over 2,000 staff members within CYF to keep in contact with their colleagues by leveraging off the same technology we developed for our clients and reducing internal call costs.
We are also placing special emphasis this year on developing our call centre staff and empowering them in their decision making. We will also be exploring ways of monitoring client satisfaction – the sensitive and confidential nature of our work, and legal framework which underpins it, makes this quite a challenge.
It should also be noted that Child, Youth and Family is in the throes of introducing a fundamentally different way of responding to situations involving the care and protection of children. The system is called Differential Response and involves partnering closely with community providers to better meet the welfare needs of our clients and create a more holistic child protection community where everybody has a role to play in keeping children safe.
Differential Response has required some significant changes to the call centre operations and will continue to keep us on our toes as it is rolled out nationwide of the next few years.
3. In your opinion do you think entering the awards (evaluating the metric you use, articulating the successes your centre has had) was useful. If so, can you provide us with tangible examples of what you learned during the process?
Putting together an application for TUANZ is a great opportunity in itself to get the team together and evaluate our achievements. The awards have really become a highlight of the year for us.
The TUANZ Awards are also a great way of benchmarking our progress from year to year to and ensuring we are keeping abreast of latest technologies. They also hold us to account - when we commit to making something happen, we certainly make sure we have done it by the time TUANZ rolls around the next year!
The TUANZ Awards are a great way of learning from other call centres too – we’re always looking at the successes of other call centres in the running for an award to see what’s working well for them and whether it could work for us too. It also shows us that the marriage between professional Social Workers and the Call Centre world is workable.
4. It's been over 6 months since the TUANZ Awards in April, what difference has the win made to you and the contact centre?
The TUANZ win gave our Call Centre staff something to really be proud of and hard-hitting proof that we are providing a service that is second to none.
It has been a real morale booster for us not just at the Call Centre, but for the whole of Child, Youth and Family and the Ministry of Social Development.
There is no exact science to social work and we can’t always get it right. But when the public have confidence that we are doing the best job we possibly can to keep children and young people safe, our staff feel more empowered and proud of what they do. They do an admirable job in very testing circumstances and they really deserve to be congratulated for the countless young lives they help to turn around. Regrettably, these successes rarely get recognised in any other forum.
5. Has the wider CYF group or Ministry of Social Development celebrated with you? and what about your clients - have you received any reaction from them?
Yes, our win has been celebrated and acknowledged far and wide! Testament to this is the influx of senior managers, politicians and community leaders who pop in for a visit to see the call centre in action and have a cuppa with our staff.
Our two TUANZ wins have provided invaluable opportunities for us ‘to tell our story’ to the rest of the ministry and also to the partner agencies who work alongside us, such as the Police.
It is important that the social workers in our offices across the country understand the work that takes place before a case comes to their attention. By being recognised by TUANZ, our staff have gained a greater appreciation about the robustness of our Call Centre processes and indeed the value of having a Call Centre within government social services.
