Source · Select Committees · Foreign Affairs Committee
Recommendation 12
12
Not Addressed
Paragraph: 33
Automated answerphone messages told travellers around the world that our embassies and consulates were closed.
Recommendation
Automated answerphone messages told travellers around the world that our embassies and consulates were closed. It is extraordinary that the FCO had no control over the answerphone messages of its own embassies. This oversight prevented many from accessing the advice and support that they needed. The FCO should make it an immediate priority to ensure that these answerphone messages can be controlled centrally.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government discusses general communication efforts for foreign travel and information on arrival in the UK, but does not address the specific recommendation about centrally controlling embassy answerphone messages.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
33
Government Response
Not Addressed
HM Government · verbatim extract
Not Addressed
We agree that this is a priority and we are taking action accordingly. There are over 200 automated caller greeting answerphones (auto-attendants) deployed globally at FCDO posts with separate night and day mode messages. The day mode message provides the caller with a number of options depending on the nature of their call, including ‘consular assistance’ for a British national in an emergency situation abroad. In this case the caller is transferred to the Consular Customer Contact Centres. The night mode message says that the post is closed and provides the hours of opening. However, the consular option is still available and callers can still access consular assistance. The unprecedented nature of COVID-19 and the speed of its spread resulted in posts having to work remotely. This resulted in the auto-attendants at many posts remaining in night mode and no one physically at the post to change this to the day mode. When a situation arises that requires the auto-attendant greetings to be changed and/or changed between night and day mode, it is normally the responsibility of the individual post to manage this. However the number of overseas FCDO staff that were working remotely out of necessity, self-isolating or both, meant that there was not a consistent method for overseas staff to manage this. However, consular assistance was still available to callers via the call tree, even though the message stated that posts were closed. the FCDO voice supplier to record a new message for each post and to change the auto- attendant from night to day mode where necessary. Engaging the supplier in this activity required a commercial agreement and took time to implement which slowed the response. To mitigate this in any future emergency situation, FCDO is creating a ‘pre-agreed’ process or ‘call-off arrangement’ with the supplier enabling a much swifter response. We expect this will be in place by the end of October 2020. The FCDO is also actively investigating a ‘cloud based’ telephony solution that would provide greater central management of the switchboard messages. However, there are technical limitations to this solutions as the service is not available in every country that the FCDO operates in and routing calls globally to an answerphone service ‘in the cloud’ and then to a contact centre will result in call degradation for callers in some countries. Speed of the Response
Read the full response on Parliament ↗