Employment services

Government Departments of Employment meet the public, for the most part, at offices located in local communities. The set of services provided normally include recruitment, pensions and social services, and these organisations typically are contacted by the public by telephoning or visiting local offices such as:

• Job Centre,
• Pensions Office,
• Child Support Agency, and
• Disability & Carers Service.

In the UK, within the Department of Work & Pensions, there are about 1,400 Job Centre offices employing around 73,000 staff. The UK Pension Service employs a further 16,000 staff in offices across the country, with a further 10,000 staff in the Child Support Agency and more than 6,500 staff in the Disability & Carers Service.

Lattice Voice applications can be deployed to assist all these staff in their daily activities, when they need to communicate with people who have little local language skills, on the telephone and in the office. For example, Job Centre staff can use Lattice Voice to communicate with job seekers who have a poor command of English but who require to give their details to the Job Centre and who need to be made aware of job possibilities. Similarly, Job Centre staff can communicate with telephone callers and visitors, in their chosen language, who require to give information about their welfare status, or who require to ask for clarification about social security regulations.

Lattice Voice applications can be focused on assisting the staff of the Pensions Service to maintain improved dialogue with the elderly members of their local ethnic communities. In particular, these applications can help to make the service more effective by providing customer-driven facilities in their chosen first language. In the Child Support Agency, by communicating with parents in their chosen language, Lattice Voice applications can help the Agency to ensure that information is accurate and up-to-date, assisting in the calculation and processing of the correct child support payments. Also, in improving the dialogue with those parents who have limited English skills, these multilingual applications can help them to better understand the legal responsibilities that they need to satisfy in their particular circumstances.