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 emails
Email communications are now handled automatically, improving response times and reducing manual effort
94% Increase in digital
strong adoption of digital services – online form submissions increased by 94%
Lower call volumes
the shift to online services resulted in fewer incoming calls
56% Processed online
reducing pressure on contact centre teams
Customer behaviour shift
increasingly choosing digital channels as their preferred way to interact
£5.1M Processed
£522K processed online in the first six months, rising to £5.1 million in two years
8,539 Cases processed
in the first six months, increasing to 69,000+ within two years
Strong team confidence
development team feels confident, supported by a stable and scalable platform
Tips & lessons learned
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Embrace the culture shift through ongoing communication
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Promote active customer contact
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Use monitoring and reporting to identify quick digital wins
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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.