MEMBERS of the public facing "long waiting times" to get through to Fife Council's contact centre have been promised it will get better.

Fed-up West Fifers have told of their frustration after hanging on the line for 40 minutes without an answer as the service struggles to cope with rising demand and an increasing volume of calls.

Diarmuid Cotter, head of customer and online services, told councillors last week: "Things are improving.

"We've got some temporary staff, eight started on Monday, the figures have improved as of last week and I expect them to get better."

And he also confirmed that members of the public would no longer have to create an online account to report faults like potholes and missed bin collections.

Mr Cotter's report to the community and housing services sub-committee said there were 483,170 calls to the contact centre in 2020-21, fewer than previous years due to COVID closures, and 88.4 per cent were answered, with 57.5 per cent answered within the target time of 20 seconds.

That's an improvement from 2019-20, although performance dipped markedly this summer with customers facing long delays and backlogs on housing access and repairs, environmental issues, blue badges, transport, passes and concessions and the Scottish Welfare Fund.

He told councillors: "If you had asked me about the contact centre at the start of April, I would have said everything had gone fine, it had been a very good year, primarily because not all services were fully tooled up, for instance housing repairs, and we had a load of help from the customer service centres with an additional cohort of staff coming in to help.

"As we've come out of lockdown, and customer service staff have had to do their own work as well, it has become a problem."

In the past few months, there have been "long waiting times" with services re-opening and an increased workload.

In addition to answering phones and emails and dealing with everything from council tax and rent collection to 156,000 community alarm calls, Freedom of Information requests and complaints, the 400 staff phone people in relation to test and protect, process free school meal and pandemic support payments, and deal with business, crisis and self-isolation support grants.

Mr Cotter added: "It's important to say the staff do continue to provide a good service and I do feel for them when there's long waiting times and they get someone coming on the phone.

"It's not pleasant if you've been waiting 25 minutes or worse when you get someone on the other end."

While more services move online, the contact centre remains important as a means of getting in touch with the council.

He added the option of meeting staff face-to-face would be maintained, calling it a "crucial strand of our customer service approach" but one that "should be used for more detailed advice and interactions rather than simple transactions".

Mr Cotter said: "I know not everyone wants to go online or do things online but it's a massive part of our business.

"Over a quarter of a million people every week go online and look at our pages so it is huge.

"During the pandemic, we managed to revamp the website, put in a new contact management system, streamline the content and add more services, and that was a big plus as we got a lot of information out online during the pandemic.

"We also launched the customer accounts (myaccount) which was not without its controversies and we now have more than 100,000 account-holders.

"Some people didn't like having to log in and create an account to report things like road faults and missed bins so what we've decided to do is make it optional to report something to the council."