Speeches by Cane.

“I am not suggesting there would be a policy, but it is a behaviour that has been found on lots of other KPIs.”

“It would be interesting to see that, and to see the trend. The suspicious person in me thinks that, when you have a KPI, there is a temptation to drop calls so that you can answer calls within the required time.”

“Are you also measuring how many calls are dropped?”

“So how many people are using it?”

“You said that the average wait time for people with a general query, not one of your priorities, is less than 100 seconds.”

“Thank you for letting me guest today. I need to declare an interest; I am also a civil service pensioner, a retired member of the FDA, and indeed, a member of the Civil Service Pensioners Alliance. My first group of questions is about the telephone answering service. We have heard of the problems that people are having…”

“I understand that.”

“—partway through service and then came back in again?”

“Do you ask for this at the end of every call? How do you do that?”

“I am interested in what testing you have done. I have a constituent who is now on the portal, but I was regularly told that he could get on and to ask him to try again. He could not, and it turned out to be because he had an asterisk in his name. Are you absolutely certain—”

“I hear that, but you are not able to do it in those three cases we heard about, so why don’t you simply say: “We are sorry that it is taking us so long to resolve this properly. We are working as fast as we can. In the meantime, we would like to offer you a loan”—”

“They are speaking to a person and then the call gets cut off.”

“What are your current customer satisfaction scores, and how are they measured?”

“Are you sure that is working correctly and consistently?”

“Once somebody is answered, are any of those calls dropped partway through—do you measure that?”

“It was not working for him, and your staff knew he had an asterisk in his name. If there was an issue with how he had to enter his name, he should have been told. That should be clearly in the instructions.”

“Okay. Let’s move on to another example. You said that multi-stint is people who left the scheme for a period and then came back in. As I said at the beginning, I am a civil service pensioner; I have tried several times to register with the portal. My last attempt was last night, and it still failed, but I do not fall i…”

“What number were you expecting four months in?”

““Until we sort this out.” Why are you not just offering it to them and making it, as it were, their right, because they are owed that money?”

“Don’t worry, it’s an example.”