Keeping the Phones Ringing While Everything Else Changed

One of the less visible challenges of Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) was what to do about customer telephony and contact centres.

On paper, consolidating contact centres into a single operation might sound like the obvious answer. In reality, it wasn't a day one requirement, and the operational services themselves hadn't yet been harmonised. Different teams were still working in different ways, supporting different processes, and in some cases delivering services differently across the legacy authorities.

Our job was not to force organisational change before the business was ready. Our job was to make sure residents could still get through to the right people.

Rather than attempting a large-scale contact centre consolidation, we took a simpler and lower-risk approach. We introduced a new council-wide telephone number and implemented a new top-level Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu. This created a single front door for customers while allowing the operational teams behind the scenes to remain largely unchanged.

The focus was on customer outcomes rather than technical perfection. Callers needed a clear route into the organisation and a straightforward way to find the service they needed. The new number and IVR provided that without requiring every service to redesign its operating model at the same time.

Just as importantly, we didn't switch off the existing routes. Residents had been using established telephone numbers for years and many of those numbers were published on websites, letters, forms and third-party systems. Turning them off would have introduced unnecessary risk and frustration.

Instead, we kept the legacy routes in place and used them alongside the new arrangements. Customers could continue to use familiar numbers while gradually becoming aware of the new single council number. This reduced disruption and gave services time to adapt at a sensible pace.

From a digital perspective, this reflected a principle we applied throughout LGR: don't create change for the sake of change. Where harmonisation delivers value, pursue it. Where it introduces risk without clear customer benefit, take a more pragmatic route.

The result was a smooth transition for residents. We established a single front door, maintained business continuity, avoided a rushed contact centre consolidation and created a platform that can evolve over time as services continue to align their ways of working.

Sometimes transformation isn't about replacing everything on day one. Sometimes it's about creating the conditions for change while making sure customers barely notice that anything has changed at all.

For me, that is exactly what good digital transformation should look like. It should reduce risk, protect service delivery and make life easier for customers. The technology is important, but the outcome is what matters. In this case, the outcome was simple: when residents needed us, the phone still rang, and they still got through to the right place.