Colchester Borough Council

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Best of breed solutions dramatically improve customer service

Although Colchester is Britain's oldest recorded town, the Council are far from having an antiquated service. The Council holds a 'Comprehensive Performance Assessment' rating of 'Excellent' a status given to authorities for delivering quality public services, recognising their forward thinking and pioneering approach to servicing the community.

With 157,000 residents, Colchester Borough Council is the third largest district council in Essex. Consistently seen by their partners and residents as an innovative council with a long history of imaginative dealings, they have a strong commitment to setting the benchmark in customer service.

Business Need

Recently, the Council has been phasing in a new customer service centre. This new centre combines multiple service areas and multi-skilled advisors, acting as a 'one stop shop' for customer enquiries. The new centre will handle most incoming enquiries to the council including taking payments and booking Council-run facilities and services.

The Council wanted to introduce centralised service deliver to offer a better, more efficient service to citizens and join up a number of disparate internal IT processes. There were a multitude of systems in use, almost one for each service provided. As customer enquiries were not diverted to individual departments, each Customer Advisor needed to know how to use each and every system. With multiple channels for customers to access services, such as email, telephone, in person and online handling customer enquiries was time consuming, inefficient and disjointed.

The following business needs were identified:

  • Leverage existing knowledge,
  • Increase customer self service,
  • Remove disjointedness
  • Improve data and process visibility,
  • Make the customer service experience consistent.

Ultimately the Council needed a single interface for data to be entered into and the data to be routed to the correct system.

Solution

The Council's software architecture needed to be slightly reworked. Very simply they needed to implement a CRM system and have an interface within that which had to be easy integrate and easy to use.

These business needs are being fulfilled through an innovative use of browser-based software from Business Web Software. The Council has implemented AchieveForms and AchieveBookings for the new centre and plan to introduce AchieveDecision for certain areas. AchieveForms is a functionally rich and intuitive to use online forms application and AchieveBookings is an exceptionally configurable resource management application.

AchieveForms has been embedded within their ARFS CMS system and Seibel CRM as the front end interface to the centre's information systems. Forms include change of circumstances notifications, special collection requests, missed bins reporting and pest control requests. The Council plan to integrate AchieveDecision with their CRM for dealing with certain customer service areas such as planning. Customer advisors rather than specialist officers will be able to deal with initial enquiries by following a guided set of questions and responses will be recorded in the CRM. Colchester County Council has also purchased the AchieveBookings Outlook Exchange Integration add-on module which extends the functionality of Microsoft Outlook.