ALMOST 130,000 calls were made to the council about the new bins – and frustrated residents were left waiting on the line for up to two-and-a-half minutes.

Over a 12-month period, 963,191 calls were made to Cheshire West and Chester Council’s (CWaC) contact centre to complain, get advice, pay council tax and apply for benefits.

But as the waste management system was rolled out across the borough, a report has revealed how staff struggled to deal with the massive influx in calls, leaving residents’ calls unanswered for up to an average of 146 seconds – more than 12 times the 20-second industry guidelines.

Last March, three months before the May Gurney waste collection service was implemented across Frodsham and Helsby, the call centre received just 3,470 calls about bins.

But as residents living in the former Vale Royal area were faced with the kerbside collections, calls rose to 16,909 in June – and spiked at a staggering 26,207 in October as the system went live across Chester.

The report – prepared by a specially formed task group set up by CWaC after an apparent drop in performance at the call centre – revealed:

A spike in January 2012 to 56,467 calls, as people queried their council tax bills,

Staff struggled to manage the high increase in calls as the May Gurney contract was implemented with average answering times shooting up from between seven and 36 seconds to between 83 and 146 seconds.

The processing of disabled ‘blue badges’ took two months – twice the expected time, after staff entered the same information twice and struggled with an increase in applications.

On average, the authority call centre receives 50,000 calls every month, but at its peak in October last year, the centre was inundated with 81,041 calls – 26,207 of them about bin collections.

In July last year CWaC’s corporate scrutiny committee set up a task group of councillors to examine the performance of the call centre, who complied a report put toward the executive on Tuesday.

They recommended the continued monitoring of the council’s customer services, which they recognised had been improved, with the average pick-up time dropping from 99 seconds in October to 20 seconds in December as staff got used to the volume of calls.

The industry standards for answering calls are to answer 90% of all calls and 80% within 20 seconds.

A Cheshire West and Chester Council spokesman said: “The council continually reviews how we deliver services to our customers and how we measure our performance to identify what is working and where we need to improve.

“It is inevitable than when changes to services are introduced the number of enquiries we receive from local residents will increase.

“The traditional contact centre metrics are being challenged in the industry and many are now using customer experience as the driving force, focusing on improving quality rather than quantity.

“The traditional metric of speed of answer does not reflect the quality of the call and was the customer satisfied. Therefore we are changing our performance indicators to reflect the customer experience.

“Speed of answer is still an important factor and will continue to be used as a service performance measure. However focussing on customer satisfaction will ensure we are delivering a service to meet our customer needs. Our customer satisfaction rating from April 2012 to February 2013 was 91%.”