A quiet piece of citizen outreach brilliance - Elmbridge Borough Council
- Summary:
- A look at a rare black swan in the shape of a public sector tech project that’s not only working, it seems to actually be helping its ‘customers’
What you probably don’t usually associate it with is British local government, let’s be honest. We’ve all had a moan or two about bizarre parking restrictions, apparently haphazard positions of what garbage needs to go in which coloured bin on which day, or puzzled as to how to complain about that pushy developer neighbour’s insane plan to build a 5-bed house in his back yard.
But, believe it or not, something’s quietly changing, in at least some parts of the Kingdom. Welcome to the second wave of ‘citizen relationship management’… probably not a term you’ve heard for a while, but which seems to be alive and well in the pioneering stance of one small corner of North Surrey.
Great ‘customer’ service with Council Tax payers
That corner’s Elmbridge Borough Council, a part of the Home Counties entirely inside the orbit of the M25 today, but which can point to a mention in the Domesday Book of a thousand years ago as proof its long English heritage. Now, that heritage has a digital face, it seems, given the Council’s commitment to a citizen relationship management programme it has called Brilliant Customer Service Every Time, or BCSET internally.
Or, more often than not, Brilliant, as in our adjective of question here. To what extent could a CRM system, even one set up to help the million service users Elmbridge, a classic 1974 non-metropolitan district council, has to support? Well, one objective criterion is peer review. In September, the UK Customer Experience Awards, which claim to recognise the “very best in the customer experience across all sectors and multiple categories”, put BCSET on its final short list in the Government/professional services and not-for-profit category.
And then there’s what Elmbridge residents tell the Council itself:
Our daily monitoring shows 80% average high satisfaction rates. I think most commercial businesses, let alone local government bodies, would bite your hands off for ratings that high.
That’s a claim from one of the main stakeholders driving the project, Dawn Crewe, recruited specifically in four years back as Head of Customer Service. Her remit - working with her colleagues in the Council’s tech function, led by Mark Lumley, Head of IT - was to change internal processes that were (you guessed - it’s the usual story) “siloed and not talking to each other properly” so as to build a unified face for the ‘customer,’ the Elmbridge user (Crewe and Lumley only ever talk in terms of ‘customers’ their ‘business’ helps, we couldn’t help but note). And that’s been achieved, claim the pair, by extensive use of a regular business-oriented CRM (customer relationship management) system, Microsoft Dynamics, combined with a shift away from classical Prince2 development methodologies to Agile.
A better metric?
What’s noteworthy about this is that too many public sector bodies seem to see their job when it comes to outreach as how quickly they answer the phone (compare HMRC’s recent bad press here), not if they actually solve the problem that prompted it. Crewe confirms the change in thinking, characteristic of the whole BCSET mindset, it seems:
“We had always measured how long it takes to answer a call, but in reality that statistic is fairly meaningless. Instead, we want to know how satisfied they are with the speed of response to the issue they’re concerned about.”
Apart from Microsoft, another Elmbridge’s ‘Brilliant’ suppliers as far as BCSET is concerned is VoiceSage, an Irish and UK twin-headquartered developer of cloud-delivered customer contact software for brands including Argos, AXA Insurance and Freemans Grattan Holdings.
The VoiceSage system is used by Crewe and her team to carry out instant polling and surveys immediately after an interaction with a resident, using text and IVM (interactive voice messaging). This, explains Crewe and Lumley, is building a database it can use as benchmark for yet more improvement; for example, low scores from an individual ‘customer’ is immediately mapped on to their fuller contact details within the CRM system, allowing the team to quickly spot negative feedback but then look to take proactive steps to rectify the situation. Elmbridge is now starting to transfer these ‘customers’ directly to a supervisor so that their problems can be discussed and resolved.Given how much more familiar it therefore is with more ‘classical’ CRM, as in Customer Relationship Management, what does it make of what this small but pioneering public sector customer’s doing? The answer you get back is, maybe not surprisingly about a customer, amazingly well - but with an interesting reason as to why:
Elmbridge is definitely well ahead of the game. But then, that’s in a context of the majority of local government not even really having a digital strategy in place, let alone a CRM one.
That’s from the firm’s Sales and Marketing Director Steven Robinson, who told diginomica why Elmbridge may be doing better than some of its peers when it comes to citizen relationship management, 2016 style:
What Elmbridge did right was to see this as strategic, organisation-wide commitment; it wanted to really improve customer service across the board, so worked backwards to see how. I think that got rid of a lot of the politics and stopped the turf wars between department heads. I see too many councils with ten year old telephony platforms with no idea how to move forward and no-one taking any kind of a joined-up view at all.
My Take
Brilliant can be a jejune word, but there does seem to be something pretty sparkly here. This is definitely a public sector ICT project that started from a sound idea - look at things from the citizen/customer perspective, not from a disjointed internal matrix, and use business software to differentiate by great service for a change. And the deft way it’s evaded the internal dogfighting to get there could also be highly suggestive for other authorities, we think.
A final observation: we’ve talked a lot about service here - but Crewe says her remit was to also save money, a goal she says has too been met by BCEST. A lot of councils will really see that as Brilliant - and they’d be right.