The commitment to making this information available has also been a radical culture change in the council offices, with 100 members of the IT department going on six-month customer service training. The second clincher for Sunrise was its neural network technology, which allows natural language searching. This technology will hopefully boost the number of problems solved on first call to 80 per cent. Using the neural technology will mean that fewer solutions are duplicated, says Carter, because the knowledge base will 'know' what you are looking for. Like Scoot, the same application will service both web and phone customers, hopefully with equal effectiveness.
Efficiency is the driver - getting better performance without dipping under mandated service levels.