A Council’s Journey to Digital Efficiency and Sustainability

A critical early initiative was the unification of telephony services. Each legacy council had operated its own contact centre, however, the new Cumberland Council’s vision included a single telephone number for all residents.

The Digital Team quickly implemented a new Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system using Liberty Converse, our omnichannel contact centre solution, which directed calls based on the caller’s postcode, with failsafe options to the relevant legacy district council’s service when appropriate.

This integration improved customer experience by providing a single point of contact, but it also streamlined operations for the staff, who now operate from one cohesive telephony system.

It also enabled them to introduce intelligent enquiry routing through a self-service form, similarly by capturing the postcode where appropriate and directing the enquiry to the relevant customer service team or back-office department that were still operating in their legacy council areas.

Starting from an application originally designed during Cumbria County Council’s time, which was to manage Freedom of Information Requests, Cumberland’s Digital Team redeveloped this to make it relevant for all the new councils to come together and utilise.

It allows for better management of customer interactions, including complaints and feedback, and can scale to incorporate all staff and services from each of the legacy councils.

The Digital Team has created a centralised ecommerce system within the Citizen Hub architecture. This system allows for the integration of various services, such as waste management, where users can purchase multiple items (eg different types of bins) in a single transaction.

A key feature of the new architecture is the implementation of a GovPay payment gateway. It’s flexible, tailored enabling GovPay services to be shared, or enabling specific GovPay services to different transactions like waste collection, archives and licensing without needing to replicate initial work for each new service.

This modular approach allows easy addition of new stores and products without repetitive development efforts, streamlining the overall ecommerce process.

Health and Well-Being Assessment:

This app is designed for health and well-being coaches to assess an individual’s health status through a questionnaire. Users complete a form, which triggers complex algorithms to analyse responses. It provides personalised health insights and recommendations to users. Plus, a back-office team receives each submission in the form on a new case, where they may assign a coach or recommend social prescribing as needed.

Social Care Brokerage Application:

This app streamlines the placement of individuals in care facilities by connecting public health teams and care providers. Health practitioners submit requests when someone requires care placement. Care providers can update their facility status (such as available beds) which is accessible by public health staff to match needs.

Adult Social Care Referral Automation:

Automating the intake and processing of adult social care referrals from sources like the NHS or ambulance services, this app removes the need for manual referral steps (like email reviews, external link clicks, record updates).

An RPA solution automates automates these steps, pulling referral details directly from multiple sources, like emails from the NHS, other third parties and also self-serve online forms directly into the adult social care system to create or update case records.

By reducing manual work, staff are freed for more meaningful interactions, which has addressed recruitment challenges and enhanced efficiency.

This app consolidates waste management for three council areas, which previously used different systems. It introduces a unified front-end interface using Liberty Create, allowing residents in any area (Allerdale, Carlisle or Copeland) to request services like bin replacements.

Liberty Create integrates directly with a new harmonised Waste Management System (WMS), creating bin order requests and scheduling these within the WMS. Removing manual timetabling and bin ordering tasks.

The build has been future proofed and operates as a micro service to allow the team to build other functionality like Garden Waste subscriptions (which are coming soon) that utilise the same bin ordering components where necessary. This reduces development and support time.

The Digital Team has replaced a manual, paper-based invoice processing system with a digital, automated workflow. Previously, invoices were manually sent with cost codes and authorisations on a blue slip via mail, which was slow and resource intensive.

Now, teams upload invoices digitally using a form, which automatically routes them for processing. A virtual worker enters the information into the finance system and payments which are under the threshold are processed automatically, after basic validation checks (such as supplier details, bank information). Invoices above the threshold are flagged for an additional review by staff.

The new process is more efficient, eliminating time-consuming email and manual data entry tasks. It streamlines the processing for 300 invoices each day.

The old system was heavily paper-reliant, even requiring attachments from email to be printed out. The team has calculated that digitising invoices saves approximately 11 trees’ worth of paper every year. As well as being more environmentally sustainable, this reduces costs of paper, postage, envelopes and toner.

The digital system also offers increased security. Automated checks also help to prevent errors which means that the finance team can detect potential fraud.