Many of the people who deal with Hinchinbrook Shire Council are not comfortable with connecting online. "That means they are more likely to use their phones to contact the council than go through online channels", says Emma Prior, the council's administration services team leader. **

"We use Dubber Call Recording for our main customer service centre. Our rates team and the regulatory compliance team also all have their phones recorded. We use the recording to deal with contentious issues – we get a lot of 'he said, she said' with our customers. We use the recordings to back us up."

She says the move to call recording came from when the council would do rates debt collection.

"Part of our process is to place reminder calls to home owners. But people would deny they were called or claim that they had missed the call and there wasn't a message.

"Now we can say: hang on, we have this recording to show that we did speak to you or leave a message on a particular date. That was the driver for getting recordings in the first place, from there we have gone on to use it in other areas."

Prior's team deals with a variety of calls. "Rates are the main ones, then there are roads, animals and cemetery enquiries. Hinchinbrook also handles food licensing. We get all sorts of things, we field things that aren't even council matters."

Information services manager Steven Veltmeyer says there are 20 Dubber Cloud Call Recording licences at the council.

He says; "Until now we have operated as separate divisions, but we are in the process of centralising all incoming calls to go through our main customer service centre. Now that we are rolling out Microsoft Teams, it will be easier to keep control of these calls".

Hinchinbrook Shire Council was the first council in Queensland to roll-out Microsoft Teams as its sole solution and the first in the state to use Dubber Cloud Call Recording on Teams.

Hinchinbrook Shire Council improves dispute resolution with Dubber call recording

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Veltmeyer says now the call recording system is bedded in, the next step is to make use of Dubber’s advanced AI features. He is interested in being able to detect predefined words and phrases that could be captured, flagged and reported on in a proactive way. This would let the council be told about conversations without needing to manually listen to everything.

He says that the council is learning how to get the best from Dubber. "We've recently started capturing data on, say, when a supervisor needs to intervene during a call. We're learning quickly."

"We are seeing patterns of how our calling works, where people come and go. We couldn't do that with our previous clunky system. Before we were guessing on the number of people who needed recording, now we have a much better idea of what we need".

Work at the council ebbs and flows. There are peaks twice a year when rates go out, there is another surge when it is time to renew food licences. Another peak is during the rainy season when there can be a lot of weather related emergency events.

Veltmeyer says moving to Microsoft Teams meant a huge cultural change for the council. He has seen schools do the same move almost overnight enabling students to learn from home when the Covid pandemic first hit. It meant even more change for council employees.

"We had a massive shift in a short time to get to the point where we are now taking phones off desks. That meant a major mind shift away from hardware to being able to answer incoming Teams calls on mobile phones. Moving to Teams made working from home possible."

One of the goals Prior is working towards is to get her team to resolve 80 percent of enquiries at the first point of contact. It has improved in recent times, but at the moment the single call clear-up rate is about 60 percent.

To get there she uses Dubber for staff training. She says: "It's all well and good to learn the theory about handling a difficult call, but to hear it done in practice, whether someone handled a call really well or really badly helps you learn even more."