Back To School: How Surrey County Council answered the call of parents and guardians

September is our contact centre’s busiest time of year without a doubt.  

Surrey County Council manages the admission of nearly 160,000 pupils to more than 350 state-funded schools. And as families get ready for that ‘back to school’ moment, our call volumes spike during the last weeks of August and into September. 

For example, in Sept 2022, we received over 15,000 calls related to education, with questions ranging from school transport to support provision.  

Such sharp increases in call volume around this time of year have historically meant that customers found themselves waiting far longer than normal to speak to us. But we knew we had to do better. 

For the past three years, we’ve been working to ensure that we answer the phones from parents and guardians more quickly.  

We wanted to ensure staff could meet this stressful and relentless period of demand with the most effective tools and organisational structure. 

Since redesigning our customer strategy, we’ve seen call volumes decrease by 29%. 

This isn’t because there are fewer queries – it’s due to our focus on solving more queries on the first call and communicating answers to common questions earlier and more clearly via our council’s communications platforms. 

How we did it 

In 2023, we started redesigning our customer strategy to prioritise customer experience over what worked best for us as an organisation. 

We created eight design principles to guide how we designed and improved our customer experience organisation-wide, and these were our ‘north star’ when it came to redesigning the Education Customer Contact Peak.  

Pooled expertise, resources and data 

We formed a multi-disciplinary team with ‘One Council’ as our strapline. By pooling our expertise, resources and data, we made greater evidence-led improvements, finding better solutions to problems.    

For example, we upskilled frontline staff to resolve more enquiries at first point of contact, which freed up specialist service teams to focus on more complex enquiries and progress cases faster. 

Communicating earlier and better 

To answer calls faster with the same number of people, we needed to reduce demand – ‘prevention is better than cure’!    

Using customer feedback and ‘walking in our customers’ shoes’, we identified how and when to improve customer communications to reduce demand. We used our learning to: 

• Make it easier to find and understand information on our website 
• Improve our written communications so they are easier to understand 
• Communicate earlier so that families have better visibility of arrangements 

These improvements reduced calls, particularly last-minute queries.   

There is still work to do, and we’re continuing to build on our learning and improvements for 2025!

Final thoughts

So how did we move from good intentions to great customer outcomes?  Here’s what we’ve learned: 

• Start with the customer, not the organisation: redesign your service, processes and people from the customer perspective first, not the organisation’s internal perspective.  Develop guiding principles that reflect that ambition, interweaving them through everything that you do. 
• Harness the power of multi-disciplinary teams: everyone’s talking about MDT, and for good reason.  Using multi-disciplinary teams from designing & implementing change through to everyday service delivery, you break down organisational-silos and ultimately deliver better outcomes for your customers 
• Be proactive, not reactive: Using customer feedback and empathy is central to improving communication, simplifying information, and acting early helps reduce avoidable contact, improve trust and better manage demand. 

Transforming our customer experience doesn’t need to be revolutionary. It’s about our mindset, how we focus our resources and bringing our teams together.  That’s how we create outcomes that work for everyone.

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

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