Sevenoaks District Council | Driving digital service efficiency

40%

More online forms

£522,747

Processed in payments online in 6 months

8,539

Cases processed in 6 months

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 omni/cross customer service strategy. With a focus on managing rising inbound volumes, their goal was to promote/offer more self-service to improve the customer experience and ease pressure on existing resources.

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

Improve customer journey

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.

Manage legacy issues

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.

Remove unnecessary delays

With the right integrated tools and a responsive CRM system in place, the team could save time and money associated with delays caused by fixing problems to deliver solutions quickly across multiple council service areas.

The solution

Efficient customer services

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.

Real-time
insights

The customer service team uses 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 Converse, the team can instantly monitor all call quality data with easy-to-use dashboards to inform their future development roadmap.

Agile responses
to requests

Team members completed their Citizen Hub certification, 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.

Liberty Create drives digital transformation from within

Through 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 Create as their CRM, a 12-month roadmap keeps the team focused. Work is underway to ensure full integration of Liberty Create with Converse, giving the customer service team the ability to offer an end-to-end customer experience.

As more digital forms are offered through 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.

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 Create they can be more productive.

— Amy Wilton, Head of Information and Customer Solutions Sevenoaks District Council

Results

Automated email management
40% 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 6 months
8,539 cases processed in 6 months
Development team more confident

Use Liberty Converse

to ease inbound volumes and enhance digital conversations

Automate with low-code

Explore what you can do with Liberty Create

Driving digital service efficiency

The challenge