Delivering case management efficiency and streamlined service delivery of welfare rights, through digital autonomy.
The challenge
Lancashire County Council is the local authority for Lancashire county, providing upper tier services to their citizens including children’s services, adult social care and infrastructure. Their digital team had already invested in our intelligent process automation platform, Liberty Create, as an enterprise low-code solution.
Their Welfare Rights service team was frustrated with their legacy casework system, which was no longer fit for purpose in meeting vital Welfare Rights service needs. They needed a user-friendly, bespoke case management solution to meet recording, data sharing and process requirements and solve challenges, including lack of flexibility and functionality.
Lack of flexibility and limited functionality
With restricted functionality, their system could no longer meet changing business needs, nor the reporting requirements of a Welfare Rights system. The legacy system could no longer cope with the case recording, GDPR and process requirements of the welfare service — negatively impacting team performance and efficiency due to manual workarounds.
Looking for a powerful way to digitise Welfare rights and other services and deliver them more effectively, they deployed Citizen Hub, our full-stack, low-code case management, workflow and process automation solution for councils.
“I’m so pleased with the new system created in Liberty. It’s so good for the advisors. It’s easy for them to use and to follow. Everything our advisors do is recorded and we can pull that information out. It’s well-structured and the real proof is when we went live with it, I didn’t have any complaints. It’s much more efficient and therefore customers get a much better service.”
Joanne Barker
Welfare Rights Manager, Lancashire County Council
The solution
The Welfare Rights Case Management system records detailed and confidential casework in a secure environment, allowing staff to support the most vulnerable people in Lancashire and ensuring they get the right advice they need to resolve complex benefits issues.
Reports and information requests are dealt with at the touch of a button.
The Welfare Rights product requirements fit well within the platform capabilities, allowing them to build interfaces and pages for the management of clients and enquiries.
The new system supports a customer-first approach, giving staff instant visibility of and access to casework across the whole service area.
Appropriate managers can adjust their own list data as and when needed, enabling real-time responses.
As service needs evolve, the digital team can rapidly and flexibly respond to change requests.
Replacing manual activities, the simple and effective workflows ensure all staff, with different permissions and digital skills and abilities, can easily use it.
It supports good quality and timely recording of casework activity, and easy application of good practice data protection measures like controlled access and automated deletion.
Reporting is vastly improved, with an instant view of all current cases, campaign monitoring and cash gains.
Lancashire County Council continue to build a growing number of additional applications using low-code. Work is underway to use Liberty Create to custom-build a case management tool that will handle asylum seeker cases, including critical reporting.
Citizen Hub is a proven way to improve council services constantly, quickly and cost-effectively. You get access to valuable apps designed specifically for local government and Netcall’s easy-to-use tech gives council users the power of low-code development to constantly improve services quickly and cost-effectively.
Local authorities can also share ideas and advice with peers at other councils, joining our collaborative community of peers.
Lancashire is committed to supporting its service users and officers across the council through introducing effective digital solutions through their own team, and using low-code and Citizen Hub allows them to control their own digital solutions and move away from vendor led solutions.
“To meet our complex service needs, our team has been able to really use Liberty’s Code Studio and its pre-built components to deliver on our unique design requirements. Without Liberty we wouldn’t have been able to deliver the level of quality apps we’re building.”
Sharon De Vall
Digital Strategy Manager, Lancashire County Council
The result
Data import of over 13,000 clients with over 14,000 enquiries
165,000 enquiry notes
Visibility of more than £20 million worth of successful outcomes for the past 6 years of data
0 complaints on implementation
400 more people helped
No impact on live service
25% increase in caseload capacity
Improved work allocation
More efficient appeals handling
Instant reporting
Hear it for yourself
A comprehensive digital roadmap
Prioritising digital service delivery, they are implementing a robust digital strategy to include all digital services and infrastructure networks. This includes delivery of apps like Council Event Ticketing and Supported Living Case Management, amongst others, with a future-forward focus on expanding citizen-first digital services. Lancashire is also actively working with other councils to share vital information about their case management tool build, enhancing cooperative working for wider citizen benefit.
This customer story features in Think Digital Partners. Lancashire County Council and Netcall were awarded the Partner and Customer Collaboration of the Yearat the SOCITM President’s Conference 2024 for Lancashire’s new Welfare Rights Case Management system, built in Liberty Create.
Impact
25 % Increase
in caseload capacity
0 Complaints
on implementation
400 more
people being helped
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