A key initiative in Plymouth’s wider Strategic Digital Transformation Programme was to improve its Council Tax self-service facilities for citizens and facilitate automation between the front-end web forms and its Capita R&B system. Increasing the rate of online self-service and automating transactions would free up contact centre and other staff to focus on more complex cases and vulnerable citizens.

Based on a successful digital transformation project with Kirklees MBC, Granicus recommended Govtech as a Revenues & Benefits integration partner for Plymouth. A new partnership between Granicus and Govtech offered the means to address digital deficiencies in Revenues as part of a single council-wide digital service. The partnership promised a fully hosted, off-the-shelf solution on the Granicus govService platform that could be configured to fully digitise Revenues in a matter of weeks and automate processing in Capita’s Revenues system.

Improvements in useability would drive uptake of online digital services by citizens. Automation would allow the council to consider how and where to reassign Customer Service resources to best meet the needs of vulnerable customers. A business case was required to underpin the investment and responsibility for developing this rested with Peter Honeywell, Plymouth’s Transformation Architecture Manager.

Setting outcomes

The key assumptions that underpinned the business case were:

• Govtech would automate at least 56% of all the customer interactions presented to it.
  The dependency in delivering this level of automation was whether Capita’s R&B system APIs would allow customer requests to be automatically processed, since no supplier had previously shown that this could be done to the extent proposed.

• The value of the capacity freed up by Govtech automation within Customer Services would cover the costs associated with the investment and the ongoing costs for the service.
  The business case investment was modelled against the expected benefits, expressed as the value of resources freed up and revenue gains from re-assigning resources into debt recovery and other high value activities. The task of realising benefits was owned by the Customer Services management team.
  Reassigning resources would play a key role in benefit realisation with the main associated dependency being the additional recovery of debt.

Following approval of the business case, Govtech undertook a 3-month discovery project to test and prove API capabilities from end to end. The results were documented and presented to the council in December which then commissioned implementation in January.

HIGHLIGHTS

Unprecedented times

Within weeks of the project commencing, the Coronavirus pandemic led to the first lockdown. Despite both organisations’ staff having to set up new home-working environments and practices, the impact on the project plan was confined to just a 4-week slippage on the planned ‘go live’ date, from May to June.
Post-live, there was continuous tracking, monitoring and joint analysis of automation rates, including identification of underlying business rules, or core product configuration issues, that were affecting automation.

By October, automation rates were approaching 70% - well above the business case breakeven point. Business rules were triggering interventions for the balance of work and these were automatically classified as High, Medium or Low priority items and sent to work queues with instructions to aid officers.

Adapting to the pandemic

The business case clearly identified and quantified the benefits that would flow from transforming citizens’ digital experiences and exploiting automation to release staff for other priorities. The pandemic had two significant effects on the business case. It greatly amplified the need to transform digital and exploit automation, and it greatly accelerated achievement of the outcomes. In a matter of weeks, the entire Revenues and Benefits service was moved online while staff were relocated to work from home and reassigned to urgent new priorities.

Automation was a key investment. It enabled services to remain operational while freeing up skilled people to deal with the emergency. A smaller team was able to manage an increased day-to-day workload whilst colleagues processed business grants, welfare changes and, later, the even more time-critical track and trace payments. Citizens and businesses in Plymouth, desperate to make ends meet, were supported by staff able to work more flexibly and cooperatively than ever before.