Every year the City of Rotterdam receives 1.3 million phone calls from inhabitants and companies. Their questions concern a wide range of topics such as taxes, income, parking, and waste disposal.  The callers span a wide spectrum of people who all have high expectations of the service level of the municipality. Callers may be people with low literacy, elderly, entrepreneurs, or other professionals. The aim of the City of Rotterdam is to offer accessible services for the entire spectrum of callers.

Currently the service is set up with 200 call agents, who are part of a job re-integration program. New call agents are gradually trained, which means they cannot answer all questions immediately. Therefore, callers are asked to choose their call topic from a selection menu (5-8 options). Based on their choice they are redirected to one of the call agents.

A review of the service carried out by the municipality (using amongst others NPS data) highlighted three key problems:

• A relatively low NPS score
• Key bottleneck for the low NPS score: A very long waiting time and an unclear selection menu
• High percentage of misdialed menu choices, leading to many internal call transfers

The outcomes of the interviews shifted our perspective – the call center should support callers to make the right selection to find the right answers to their questions. It comes down to feeling Competent. Other important needs in this context were Autonomy (having control over when and how you want to ask for help), Community (people want to feel part of Rotterdam), and Morality (many calls touched on moral topics, such as improving one’s environment). Interestingly, the need for speed or efficiency (which ladders up to the fundamental need for Comfort), which we would have expected based on the NPS results, did not make it to the list of most important needs!