An analysis of the data produced to inform the project business case

Telephone calls

The Contact Centre has a 40-seat capacity and handles the majority of calls from the public across a range of services, including Planning.

Planning is considered as a small service within the Contact Centre and so has no dedicated officers taking calls. Callers are routed using IVR to an available Customer Service Adviser, acting as a ‘triage’ for calls to the planning department. It does not have trained planners working within it.

A large proportion of calls received are for a named individual, but local policy is to not give out their direct phone numbers.

Annual calls

Data range: 1 April 2017 to 31 March 2018

• Total calls received: 209,474

Data range: 1 April 2018 to 31 January 2019

• Total calls received: 180,732
• Planning calls: 6,256 (3.5%)
• Waste & Recycling calls: 26,635 (13.1%)
• Revenues & Benefits calls: 53,511 (29.6%)

Call volumes are also published online

Data on annual planning calls is analysed below

Sample calls

Of a sample of 100 planning calls taken by the contact centre;

• 7.9% could be resolved by the first line customer agent
• 4.9% were referred to the council’s planning website pages, or the Planning Portal
• 5.9% were referred to the Planning Drop-in Service for discussion
• 27.7% required an email to the general planning email address or a specific planning officer due to the nature of the query
• 8.9% were referred for a call back by a planning duty officer due to the nature of the query
• 30.7% needed to be redirected by phone, either to a named officer requested or a planning-related service (Planning Duty Officer, Applications Team, Ecology Officer)
• 13.9% of calls were found to be non-planning related, or for a different authority

Of the sample calls, 20% were for a named officer

Face to face visits

Data range: 01/02/2018 to 21/02/2019

Face to face volumes are published online

Customers are able to pre-book appointments by phone to see a customer service adviser about a range of council services, but for planning customers they are told about the Planning drop-in service operating hours and have to present themselves for an appointment on the day.

The drop-in service operates 3 hrs per day using 20 minutes interview slots (10:00am to 1:00pm, with the last appointment at 12:40pm). It provides limited professional advice but this does not include if planning permission is required, for which a separate pre-application process is available.

Customer Service Advisers saw 768 customers as “Fast-Track” appointments and the Planning Duty officer saw 832 customers as appointments.

Emails

Data range: 17/12/2018 to 11/3/2019

The council has a generic inbox for planning enquiries (planning@oxford.gov.uk) which is staffed by the Applications Team within the Contact Centre. The team often dedicates one member of the team to managing the inbox all day.

Data was extrapolated to an annual equivalent and shows;

• 9,829 emails are received each year, with 9,142 emails sent from the address
• There are an average of 237 emails received per week
• 3.9% of incoming emails are generated by the web contact form for the service
• 3.2% are notifications from the Planning Portal for new planning applications or payments received
• 13.8% of mails are internal (colleagues and distribution lists)

Web contact form emails

Data range: 19/12/2018 to 11/3/2019

90 web form emails were analysed to assess topics of enquiry. Of these, 4 were duplicates and were ignored from the assessment. Of the remaining 86;

• 26.7% were seeking information about the need for planning permission for a proposed development
• 9.2% specifically related to enquiries about loft conversions
• 8.1% concerned applications or developments by neighbours
• 5.8% were lodging objections to planning applications or decisions
• 4.7% related to change of use enquiries
• 4.7% were requesting appointments with the planning drop-in service

Website

Website visits

Data range: 11 March 2018 to 10 March 2019

The council’s website had over 2m visits. 2.49% of these visitors used the general Contact Us page with nearly 50% of people leaving the site afterwards.

2.44% of all visits were related to planning, nearly all of which used the main planning landing page. Over a third of these visits led to the Contact Us page before leaving the website.

Nearly 9% of all site searches related to planning. 76% of site searches were from just 4 pages;

• View and comment on planning applications
• Planning landing page
• Planning applications landing page
• Current planning applications

These pages also accounted for the most common page before trying the Contact Us page.

Website downloads

Data range: 01/01/2018 to 31/12/2018

A total of 208,000 documents were downloaded from the website during this time. The top 100 downloads amounted to 91,036 downloads. Of this sum, planning-related items accounted for 28,733 (31.6%) downloads.

The top ten planning-related downloads were;