Govtech Customer Story
Using digital automation to reduce manual input, limit intervention and free up much needed resource.
The challenge
Achieving a balanced budget is a challenge that councils face every year but, with continuing pressures, this has become even more challenging. Demand for services is rising, whilst expectations for how services will be delivered, particularly to vulnerable citizens, have grown. With resources stretched thinner, timely support decisions and rapid processing of changes is vital to aid sustainable collection plans.
Four years ago, Wakefield Metropolitan District Council needed to reduce its operating costs and improve service delivery, whilst freeing up staff to focus on debt recovery. Wakefield chose Govtech to help deliver these objectives. The subsequent digital transformation in Revenues & Benefits is still paying dividends.
Digital transformation to enable a 24/7 mobile friendly service, where customers could transact with the council in their own time and through their channel of choice would, through reducing unnecessary contact and automating processing, release team resources to focus on more pressing priorities.
“We wanted to reduce the amount of time spent on manual data input and records checking in Revenues and Benefits, so we drafted a business case to look at the impact of online self-service with automation. We looked at various suppliers and, whilst other products appeared cheaper on paper, only Govtech’s webCAPTURE and eCAPTURE services could show a proven reservoir of customer automation data and outcomes that would underpin our business case.”
Anthony Derbyshire
Business Development Manager, Wakefield Metropolitan District Council
The solution
“When we went live in October with webCAPTURE, our in-year collection rate at that point was 0.25% down on the previous year. However, by March, our in-year collection rate was 0.25% UP on the previous year. The 0.5% shift in the first 6 months of live running was worth £750,000.“
Anthony Derbyshire
Business Development Manager, Wakefield Metropolitan District Council
The result
The automation provided by webCAPTURE was a cornerstone in the subsequent internal transformation of the Revenues & Benefits service. Former silos and lines of demarcation have been broken down and staff have been re-trained and cross-skilled to enable a much more flexible and responsive service.
Impact
4,000
staff hours saved per year
£130k
savings in the first year
£750k
recovered aged debt
As more citizens and businesses transact online, the quality of their digital experience is not determined merely by completion and submission of a web form, but by what happens afterwards. Govtech’s digital process automation services transform back-office processing by eliminating errors, reducing cycle times and speeding up responses.
The councils wanted to remove departmental silos and enable an agile workforce to work from anywhere. To effectively automate services and prioritise workloads, they needed a single integrated platform to host all customer requests, perform complex case management and operate workflows.
With demand rapidly increasing, Tewkesbury Borough Council turned to digital, using their digital transformation program to improve services for its customers, deliver environmental improvements and make significant financial savings.
A digital team, formed of citizen developers and traditional IT staff, are providing low-code enabled Innovation-as-a-Service for the council’s evolving requirements.