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Colchester Borough Council use Achieve suite for new customer service centre
Colchester Borough Council, Britain's oldest recorded town, holds a 'Comprehensive Performance Assessment' rating of 'Excellent'; a status given to authorities for delivering quality public services, recognising their forward thinking and pioneering approach to servicing the community.
Recently, the Council has been phasing in a new customer service centre. This new centre combines multiple service areas and multi-skilled advisors, acting as a 'one stop shop' for customer enquiries. The new centre will handle most incoming enquiries to the council including taking payments and booking Council-run facilities and services.
The Council wanted to introduce centralised service delivery to offer a better, more efficient service to citizens and join up a number of disparate internal IT processes.
Prior to implementing the Achieve products, there were a multitude of systems in use, almost one for each service provided. As customer enquiries were not diverted to individual departments, each Customer Advisor needed to know how to use each and every system. With multiple channels for customers to access services, such as email, telephone, in person and online, handling customer enquiries was time consuming and inefficient.
The Council has implemented AchieveForms and AchieveBookings for the new centre and plan to introduce Achieve-Decision for certain areas.
AchieveForms has been integrated with ARFS CMS system and Siebel CRM as the front end interface to the centre's information systems.
Forms include change of circumstances notifications, special collection requests, missed bins reporting and pest control requests.
For online bookings, AchieveForms has been integrated with AchieveBookings and a SQL Server database to allow customers to respond to customer requests for new bookings and queries on existing bookings. Users can remain in the same user environment and generate bookings from a form when required.
The Council plan to integrate AchieveDecision with their CRM for dealing with certain customer service areas, such as planning. Customer advisors rather than specialist officers will be able to deal with initial enquiries by following a guided set of questions and responses will be recorded in the CRM.
Colchester County Council has also purchased the new AchieveBookings Outlook Exchange Integration add-on module.
The project has been extremely successful so far and the council are looking to include more services within its scope
Introducing automated, user-friendly systems for customer service staff means significant time and costs savings, greater staff satisfaction and visible, cohesive systems.
The future plan is to continue delivering easy to use, streamlined service channels.