Please find Devon County Council’s response to each of your questions below;
What does Devon County Council spend on on-hold music each year?
£0
What specific tracks does Devon County Council use in its on-hold music?
We purchased a CD some years ago which is royalty free, containing some simple music on hold tracks.
How did Devon County Council choose its on-hold music supplier? i.e. was it a tender process?
No. We purchased a simple small music on hold player from our PABX maintainers to connect to our PABX, copied the music from the CD onto the SD card and it’s been working like that ever since. Total expense would not have been more than a couple of hundred pounds.
How long are callers kept on hold when ringing Devon County Council?
We are only able to answer this question in relation to our Customer Services Centre, which has a call flow process in place at the start of all telephone calls.
- The caller will hear a recorded message which mentions data protection and that the call is recorded for training and monitoring purposes.
- The call is then answered by the next available advisor. If no advisers are immediately available the call is queued, and the length of time the customers spends in the queue is dependent on variables such as seasonal demand, day of week, time of day, etc.
- During the last 12 month period, the average length of time calls queued before being answered is 57 seconds.
- If the caller is placed on hold once their call has been answered by an adviser, for example, to establish further information or to gain additional assistance relating to their query, there is no set period of time for this activity and it would depend on the query, although the aim is to respond as soon as possible.
- If the advisor was unable to answer the query following this period on hold, then they would go back to the caller, inform them of this and arrange for a call back to be made once the relevant information could be gained
- Our system does not provide a statistic that gives any average, or longest, time ‘on hold’ for these types of queries.