Service Birmingham's contact centre that deals with over 2 million calls a year has just been awarded a top industry award - after the first year of the contract.

Based at Fort Dunlop and Waterlinks House, the contact centre which handles all customer calls to the city council, has just been awarded the prestigious Customer Service Excellence (CSE) standard by the Government's Cabinet Office.

Service Birmingham took over responsibility for handling the council's contact centre, from its previous contractor, last February.

The CSE Standard is an elite accreditation covering five key criteria and awarded to organisations that:

  ·  Demonstrate an in-depth understanding of customers

  ·  Build a customer-focused culture

  ·  Provide information to customers that is accurate and detailed

  ·  Deal effectively with customer problems that arise

  ·  Clearly shows that the standards and targets they have for dealing with     customers are clear and measurable.

Welcoming the CSE Standard accreditation, Service Birmingham chief executive Stewart Wren said: "Achieving the Customer Service Excellence standard is a real tribute to the hard work of all the team in the contact centre from managers to call advisers.

"Many vulnerable people rely on us to access key public services so we have a duty to make the system as efficient and easy to use as possible. All the team here have worked hard to ensure that on average four out of five calls are answered in 20 seconds or less and we have achieved an independently verified customer satisfaction rate of 82%."

Paul Stanfield, Service Birmingham's operations director who is responsible for the contact centre, said: "Our contact centre is one of the biggest and most efficient anywhere in the public sector.

"The sheer scale of the operation is enormous. Dealing with two million calls each year is the equivalent of every single person in Luxembourg or Malta phoning up four times each.

"When you consider that the contact centre is available 24/7 every day of the year and deals with the complete range of detailed customer queries, it really is a mammoth undertaking."