Our contact times have changed

As part of the drive to improve the way you get in touch with us, we’ve made changes to our Customer Contact centre. 

From 5th September 2022, customers will be able to contact the Customer Team by phone between 8am and 5pm. This is a change from the current contact hours of 8am to 6pm. Our out of hours service will begin from 5pm so customers calling in with emergencies will continue to have that support.

Why are we making this change? 

Our Customer Contact team receives between 50 and 60 calls per hour, on average, between 8am and 5pm.This drops to approximately five or six calls between 5pm and 6pm. By making this change, we’ll be able to allocate more colleagues to answer calls at the busiest times of the day, which will reduce waiting times for customers. This builds on existing improvements we’ve made to improve call waiting times – in July, the average wait time for customers calling into contact centre in July was just 1 minute 41 seconds. We hope that by making this change we can consistently keep waiting times as short as possible.   

We’re also reducing the number of options available in the main menu when you call us. We understand that these could be confusing, and added to your wait time so we want to simplify the process for callers. 

We pride ourselves on ensuring our contact centre service works in the best possible way for you and understand that we’ve fallen short of this on occasion. We’ve listened to your feedback and want to make sure we are utilising your time, and ours, in the quickest and most efficient way possible.  

Customers may continue to contact us using other methods available such as email, live chat and social media. We’ll also call you at your convenience if you send us your contact details. See all the different ways you can contact us.  

We understand that this is a significant change and want to ensure that we continue to improve our service to you. We’ll be regularly reviewing how these new contact times are working for you and will assess in in March 2023. 

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.