Don't you hate waiting on the phone?

If you have ever spent time waiting on hold for an airline, insurance company or utility to answer your call you will know how frustrating that is and what a waste of your time. There are a lot of better things you could be doing with your day.

What if you are a teacher? A social worker? What if you are a nurse? What if you are a mandated notifier?

According to this SA Government data there were 108113 contacts made to the SA Government Child Abuse Report Line in 2020/2021. This is the total number of phone calls and eCARL (online) reports. Of these 41280 were eCARL- reports made online. The remaining 66833 were telephone calls made to the call centre, many by mandated notifiers on our front line.

Of the calls made the average call waiting time was 11 min 49 seconds. Of the calls made only 53474 were answered. 13359 were not answered by an operator.

Of the calls that were made let's presume half were made by mandated notifiers- people like teachers. That's 33416.5 calls made with an average wait time of 11 min 49 seconds, or 709 seconds of waiting per call.

That's 23,692,298.5 seconds.

That's 394,871.6 minutes.

That's 6581.2 hours.

That's 877.5 days.

That is 877.5 days of effort missed waiting on the phone from some of our most stretched front line staff. 877.5 days that our teachers are not teaching, every year.

When we think about the problems that our communities, our kids and our front line services are facing it's easy to see that finding a way to give back 877.5 days of time per year to teachers is important. That extra 11 minutes and 49 seconds that are spent waiting on the phone for someone to pick up might not sound like much, but when our budgets are stretched and our front line staff are at capacity that is time that could be much better utilised.

Or maybe it will free up capacity for someone to answer the other 13359 calls that were not answered?

Contact us if you would like to explore ways that you can redesign your processes and customer experiences to get better outcomes for your community.