South Hams District Council transforms processes faster to drive improved CX
The challenge
South Hams District Council is a south west Devon local authority delivering a range of services for residents and businesses. Working with West Devon Borough Council they have undertaken an exciting transformation programme to revolutionise customer service delivery.
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. This would support the councils in reaching greater efficiency and customer satisfaction, plus minimising shadow IT and unofficial employee workarounds.
One platform to meet many aspirations
This was an opportunity to re-engineer internal processes to be smooth, automated and efficient. The platform would be future-proof, enabling the two councils to make flexible improvements in-line with changing business needs. With Liberty Converse already in play, our omnichannel contact centre solution, now was the time to roll-out Liberty Create, our low-code platform.
“Not only can we design and develop new applications quickly, but Liberty Create allows us to build a concept and easily show how it works to the wider team. Despite having a much smaller team, we are seeing rapid transformation in about a third of the time and using low-code has enabled us to push processes out about six times faster than the previous system.”
Jim Davis
Customer Improvement Manager, South Hams District Council
The solution
South Hams implemented Liberty Create during the early stages of the pandemic, putting its low-code capabilities to the test straight away by developing a new discretionary grants solution.
Liberty Create also provided real-time reporting functionality and valuable workflow insights.
Citizen Hub was the next stage in South Hams’ digital evolution – our low-code application development platform for councils, which includes citizen relationship tools and case management – out of the box. It empowered the South Hams team to deliver efficient and citizen-centric digital services with purpose-built applications and integrations.
They developed their first app in just one week.
Using our AppShare to download a similar app which they used as a scaffold to hang their own specific requirements from – it was easy to make it meet the council’s own needs quickly.
Already using our complete omnichannel contact centre solution, Liberty Converse, the effective integration of Liberty Create and Converse now enables the councils to funnel all customer contact through customer services.
This ensures that enquiries are all managed under a single consistent queue.
South Hams have also utilised the social messaging module of Converse.
“Using AppShare gave us a fantastic start. With a little technical help from Netcall, we were able to deploy a live process, built from scratch, that suited our requirements in less than a week from taking delivery of the Liberty Create program. The new app also saved our case management team time by automating as much of the business logic as possible.”
Mike Ward
Head of IT Practice, South Hams District Council
The result
In 18 months, they transformed 90 processes
They now have a secure portal allowing citizens to log and manage their own cases, with integrated forms and progress updates
Channel choice for citizens and a nudging process to digital (such as by email after a phone call) to make switching to online easy
A central customer record and easy omnichannel handling for contact centre staff
End-to-end processes that extends the councils’ capacity to integrate with third-party solutions and legacy software
Performance management driven by SLAs in real-time, allowing the team to exceed customer expectations
They can now support the mobile workforce to update case tasks, even with patchy mobile coverage
They have introduced self-service and integrated tech, like chatbots, to shift routine tasks to digital
Moving forward, the unity of Netcall’s Liberty Converse, Create and Citizen Hub solutions will provide these two councils with a complete end-to-end solution, facilitating a seamless customer experience for citizens and businesses. The effective integration of Liberty platform will enable the councils to funnel all customer contact through its customer service function, ensuring enquiries are all managed under a single queue of work and offering consistent responses.
Impact
75%
of customers now self-serve
Delivered
huge savings
Greater
visibility of high value tasks
One solution to meet many aspirations
Re-engineer your internal processes to be smooth, automated, efficient and future-proof – here’s how we’re enabling the councils to make flexible improvements in-line with changing business needs.
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.