Enhanced customer journeys with low-code powered customer insights
The challenge
Sevenoaks District Council is one of the UK’s 2% best-performing district councils, serving a largely rural area in west Kent.
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.
Improve the customer journey and manage legacy issues
To enhance the customer experience, the team needed to integrate customer contact channels for better stats and insight, and to move away from disconnected data within their existing CRM system. By replacing their standalone forms system and migrating away from their existing CRM, the team wanted to ease their reliance on IT to deliver solutions quickly by focusing on problem-solving skill sets.
Deploying Citizen Hub, they gained the integrated tools and a responsive CRM system. This would enable the team to save time and money, fixing the problems which cause delays, by delivering solutions quickly across multiple council service areas.
“What low-code has given us is the ability to not be reliant on pure IT development, enabling us to drive simple digital transformation, alongside more complex transformations.”
Amy Wilton
Head of Information and Customer Solutions, Sevenoaks District Council
The solution
Rapid routing and auto responses via chatbot in Liberty Converse, our contact centre solution, has eased inbound workload and enhanced conversations across digital channels. More self-service and integration with inbound emails means the team can focus on more complex queries.
This digital shift in behaviour is promoted by ongoing caller education, and most customer cases are now processed online, e.g., large item collections. The integrated GovPay widget within our low-code process automation platform, Liberty Create, supports growing online payments and automated processing. Across multiple service areas, forms are being replaced and designed in Create.
The customer service team uses Liberty Create for a better view of the customer. Real-time workflows give customer-facing teams a view of back-office processes e.g., waste services, to better inform customers.
Making the most of the upgrades and enhancements in Liberty Converse, the team can instantly monitor all call quality data with easy-to-use dashboards to inform their future development roadmap.
Team members completed certification in Citizen Hub – our full-stack, low-code case management, workflow and process automation solution for councils. With mentoring from Netcall to get started with low-code. This confident team has also adopted an agile project management approach to tackling each new service request.
With clear design principles and a future-forward roadmap in place, the team is empowered to build and iterate solutions rapidly. A faster turnaround in solution delivery means they can support more services across the council and drive ongoing customer improvements.
The result
Automated email management
94% rise in online form offering
Less phone calls
56% of call cases now processed online
Shift in customer behaviour
£522,747 processed in payments online via create in the initial 6 months, £5.1m in under 2 years.
8,539 cases processed in the first 6 months, rising to more than 69,000 within 2 years of going live
Development team more confident
Tips & lessons learned
Embrace the culture shift through ongoing communication
Promote active customer contact
Use monitoring and reporting to identify quick digital wins
Use low-code to complement IT skills
“The team is finding their job easier because they’ve got a better view of the customer. It’s quicker, it’s slicker, and they can do what they need to do. By using Liberty Create they can be more productive.”
Amy Wilton
Head of Information and Customer Solutions, Sevenoaks District Council
Driving digital transformation from within
Using Citizen Hub and Liberty Create, processes are being streamlined from within. The team is able to build and test solutions quickly, and customer insights are helping prioritise projects, based on real-time data and contact requirements, to deliver immediate wins. The use of online forms has risen rapidly to drive a shift towards more digital behaviour.
What’s next
As they fully migrate to Liberty Create as their CRM, a 12-month roadmap keeps the team focused. Work is underway to ensure full integration of Liberty Create with Liberty Converse, giving the customer service team the ability to offer an end-to-end customer experience.
As more digital forms are offered through Liberty Create, they expect phone volumes to come down. To complement online payments, work is underway to offer direct debit renewals.
The team is also looking to expand forms to support departments like Revenues and Benefits, while building apps to support field staff with real-time updates on mobile devices e.g., waste service crews.
Impact
94%
more online forms
£5.1m
processed in payments online in under 2 years
69,422
cases completed in under 2 years
Achieve efficiency
Enhance your customer journeys with low-code powered insights
Scottish Forestry needed to move fast, making decisions to fulfil business needs and be fully operational. They trained some of their team on Liberty Create, our low-code platform, as the speed of developing would enable them to get systems configured quickly
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.