Govtech Customer Story
Improving service offerings and prioritising those in need, in pursuit of its Digital First customer strategy
The challenge
Salford City Council are pursuing a ‘Digital Salford’ ambition, a central theme of which is their ‘Digital First’ customer strategy. Against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving technological world and continuing budgetary pressures, the council aims to improve customer service and target and prioritise services to those who need them the most.
In pursuit of this strategy, the council’s Revenues service identified operational challenges that needed to be addressed. The council wanted to:
Govtech’s webCAPTURE service was chosen after a full business case analysis because of the proven results it had achieved elsewhere. webCAPTURE can automate around 80% of the manual processing that currently consumes team resource in handling transactions submitted online for Council Tax and Business Rates transactions.
“Working with Govtech was incredibly easy. Govtech understood our questions and issues, which is not always the case with other suppliers. It felt like one project team, and post project launch, they remain incredibly supportive.”
Sue Virgin
Revenues Operations Manager, Salford City Council
The solution
“Working with Govtech has been a pleasure. They are collaborative, and there are no hidden surprises: what Govtech promised, they delivered.”
Sue Virgin
Revenues Operations Manager, Salford City Council
The result
The council’s digital ambition and progress has also been recognised nationally, with Salford being awarded both ‘Digital Council of the Year’ and ‘Overall Digital Leaders 100 Winner’ at the Digital Leaders 100 awards in June 2018. A tremendous accolade, but the council isn’t content to sit still; instead, it’s looking ahead to further improve its customer offering.
Working with Govtech, Salford adopted an early pilot of Single Person Discount reviews, which rapidly showed a financial benefit. The team also have plans to better manage the high volume of student and landlord transactions and by constantly reviewing their online offer, they are looking at greater integration with other systems so that the customer journey is quicker, easier, and better.
48,000
online transactions in the first year
> 50%
of all queries require no manual intervention
Up to 100%
full automation of simple CT changes
> 50%
increase in staff productivity – enabling focus on more meaningful work
No matter what your starting point is, get in touch with Govtech and the team will arrange an informal conversation to understand what improvements you want to make and why, explore ways digital process automation may be able to assist and, if you need it, provide help to write a business case based on achieving those goals.
The council wanted a way to easily enable service teams to develop and maintain their own forms and apps, with no development experience and very little training – they decided to use low-code to build a no-code form builder app, called Form Builder.
Making a real difference across their community, Camden Council has a vision of giving its citizens a great customer experience, with more choice. To build a holistic, connected view of their citizens, they needed a new CRM system to gain insights into the needs of citizens.
Working hard to deliver quality customer citizen services, Sevenoaks needed a solution to better support their proactive omnichannel customer service strategy. With a focus on managing rising inbound volumes, their goal was to promote more self-service to improve the customer experience and ease pressure on existing resources.