GPSJ Autumn 2024 ONLINE - Flipbook - Page 40
GPSJ
LOCAL AUTHORITY & COUNCIL
How a Single View of the Citizen can boost
resident experience and the bottom line
Owen Hodge, Product Manager at Headforwards
start.
Owen Hodge
As the impact of recent
Government and economic
decisions have put local
councils under more pressure
than ever before, councils are
turning to digital technology
to build e昀케ciencies that
can improve their 昀椀nancial
position to be able to
maximise provision for their
communities.
Challenges for local
councils to digitalise
services
As part of their remit, local
authorities provide a wide range
of services to a population with
diverse requirements, which leads
to a wealth of data from a range
of sources, held in disparate
locations in legacy systems, and
on paper, email, or cumbersome
spreadsheets.
In a typical scenario where
a resident needs to contact a
council about its services or to
make a report or a change, their
engagement may be via phone
call, email, or completion of a
form. There is typically no central
hub for the resident to keep track
of progress in their case or to
add an update. This may prompt
a follow-up call to the call centre
that is already over-stretched
and unable to give the resident
the time required. In turn this can
negatively impact the experience
for both the resident and call
centre sta昀昀.
In fact, a survey by the County
Councils Network (CCN) has
revealed that more than half (51%)
of England’s county and rural
local authorities are more likely to
cut their 2025 services in adult
social care, such as care homes
and support for voluntary and
charity groups. There is additional
pressure with the Department
of Science, Innovation and
Technology’s publication of the
new Blueprint for Modern Digital
Government.
This may also see council
technology leaders who haven’t
already embarked on digitalisation
scrambling for ways to integrate
How the single view of the
disparate customer data sources
citizen works
to save costs and improve
resident experiences. Yet many
The answer is to have shared
Goupil lack
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operators total
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localThe
authorities
the digital
data
that runs across all customer
maturity or don’t know where to
touchpoints. This is critical to
40
cut down administration and
enable a smooth customer
experience. This is known as the
Single View of the Citizen, which
aims to replace outdated and
ine昀케cient processes, bringing data
sources and services together
for e昀케cient handling and secure
access via the local authority
Contact Centre’s CRM (Customer
Relationship Management) tool.
With a Single View of the
Citizen, contact centre sta昀昀 can
deal with cases and requests
more e昀케ciently and e昀昀ectively.
It eliminates time-wasting
duplication, can speed up case
resolution and send automated
noti昀椀cations to appropriate
residents, improving resident
experience and reducing operator
workload in an otherwise often
overstretched environment.
By embracing digital technology
to unify systems and provide a
Single View of the Citizen, budgetsaving changes can be made.
Critically, business information
reporting tools can be used to
identify potential savings, for
instance where more income may
be available for the council to help
support their service provision, or
where particular demand exists
for adult or children’s social care
services.
A resident portal which
centralises all information not
only improves the resident’s
user experience by reducing the
number of di昀昀erent accounts
they need to manage, but also
minimises the number of calls they
may need to make to the contact
centre raising or following up
cases, thus reducing the team’s
workload. This also allows contact
centre sta昀昀 to allocate more time
where required to resolve the
residents’ issues e昀昀ectively.
GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC SECTOR JOURNAL WINTER 2024/2025
Resident Portal and other
functionality
There is speci昀椀c technology
that can enable services to be
available online 24/7, which most
consumers now expect of council
services. These should include:
• Resident Portal
This is a hub where the resident
can access multiple services via
SSO (Single Sign-on). The aim is
for residents to be able to make
a council tax payment, start a
garden waste subscription, submit
a report, or respond to local
planning applications, for example,
through one portal without having
to remember multiple sets of login
credentials.
• Functionality for 昀椀eld sta昀昀
Functionality for 昀椀eld sta昀昀 to
interact with, and update, cases
in the central CRM system can
be available through use of the
Dynamics Field Service module
on an iPad or smartphone. By
replacing a manual process where
a paper form is completed in
triplicate and information copied
to the system once back in the
o昀케ce, this will save signi昀椀cant
administration time and reduce
the risk of human error.
• Business Information
Reporting
The consolidation of data from
various locations and apps
also improves data visibility
and consistency for business
information reporting, utilising
tools such as Microsoft Power BI
and Dynamics Customer Insights
to look at such areas as debt
and demand as a Single View.
Such analysis can be used to
identify potential savings, where
more income may be available
for the council to help support
their service provision, or where
particular demand exists for adult
or children’s social care services
for example.
