16 September 2025 · Miriam Hale
Repeat callers hiding inside recoded contact-centre tickets
Contact centres recode for decent reasons: a missed bin that becomes a replacement lid, a pothole that becomes a defect inspection, a repair that becomes a survey. The resident still rang twice. If the repeat report only looks at the first code, the second ring vanishes.
We match on a stable identifier where you have one — a council tax reference, a UPRN, a phone number hashed by your own team before it reaches us. Where you have only a name and a postcode, we match cautiously and print the uncertainty. False twins help nobody in an ombudsman file.
Highways are especially prone to recodes because inspections generate a new job. A street with five “defects” may be one resident and a crew that keeps finding the same stretch of failed surface. The pattern review does not accuse the crew. It shows the chair that volume and households are different counts.
If you change codes mid-year, tell us before the extract. A recode that folds “missed assisted collection” into “missed bin” will look like an improvement and a deterioration at once. We would rather reprint a baseline than smooth the join.