SUCCESS STORY / CITY OF YORK COUNCIL
A big win for digital transformation
Savings realised within 3 months and information never previously available being used to make service improvements.
KEY OBJECTIVES & OUTCOMES
1.
Target of £200,000 savings per annum
2.
Over 1,000 digital transactions per week
3.
>35% reduction in phone calls
4.
80% of calls answered within 20 seconds
Brief
Implement a digital transformation initiative that will enable the City of York to support and automate online transactions in order to reduce manual effort, minimise unnecessary customer interaction, exploit information to improve business functions and in turn, deliver much needed savings for the council.
About City of York Council
- Around 90,000 chargeable dwellings
- Over 6,500 NDR accounts
- Around 25,000 students
- Around 4,000 new HB/CTR claims per annum
Solution
Govtech’s webCAPTURE and eCAPTURE services were implemented to deliver digital process automation. Data from other councils using the services showed that around 80% of manual workload would be fully automated. The remaining balance would be classified and loaded into prioritised document management work queues. Officers would spend time only on things that required their skills and expertise; anything they didn’t need to see would be completed and archived automatically. The council would focus on cross-skilling, maintaining a flexible workforce as part of a clear vision of what it wanted to achieve.
Results
The remarkable thing about webCAPTURE is the speed of implementation, which is extremely quick - we were realising savings and other benefits within 3 months of going live. You really don’t need to worry about back office integration and automation. The eCAPTURE and webCAPTURE services work extremely well.
David Walker, Head of Customer & Exchequer Services and Digital Service Project Lead
webCAPTURE enables us to look at our business in new ways by giving us information we didn’t have before; we can see which transactions are not automated and why. That enables us to amend our business rules where needed to eliminate unnecessary checks and other interventions.
Paul Sanderson, Revenues Manager
Introducing a new channel
One of Paul’s objectives was to reduce the effort consumed in trying to contact people who didn’t want to be speak to the council. webCAPTURE was able to indirectly help with this as the contact information it collected enabled the council to communicate with citizens in new ways, including via SMS and email.
One example of resources saved was in Recovery.
"SMS linked to online special payment arrangements, saves wasted time on fruitless telephone calls and increases our Recovery capacity.”
HIGHLIGHTS
£200,000
savings per annum achieved
8
vacant posts in CSC/Revs withdrawn
over 1,000
digital transactions per week
>35%
reduction in phone calls achieved
80%
of all calls answered within 20 seconds
100%
of Housing Benefit and CTR claims submitted online
SMS & Email
communications introduced for citizens
All standout digital transformation success stories begin somewhere...
No matter what your starting point is, get in touch and our team will arrange an informal conversation to understand what improvements you want to make and why, explore ways digital process automation may be able to assist and, if you need it, provide help to write a business case based on achieving those goals.