CX Automation in the Public Sector: The City of Edinburgh Council Boosts Efficiency and Saves Costs. Here’s How.
January 22, 2025
Ever wondered what it takes to make a city work and help their communities thrive? Spoiler alert: a lot of work, strategic planning, and a complex technological and human infrastructure—often managed within a strict budget.
City councils need to provide their constituents with social services, efficient waste management, access to education, roads, electricity, well-maintained public spaces, and adequate support when needed—just to mention a few of the many responsibilities of local governments. Therefore, boosting efficiency and extending employee capacity is key to a city’s success.
The City of Edinburgh Council, a long-standing customer of Verint, realized the power of CX automation. 78 percent of their top ten case-types by volume is processed via digital self-service with minimal or no human intervention, resulting in:
- lowered costs,
- expanded agent capacity, and
- elevated citizen experiences.
After reaping the benefits of an earlier project and increasing citizen satisfaction to 85 percent, the Council continues to leverage Verint for Citizen Engagement™ in maximizing channel shift: delivering and promoting the use of online self-service—where appropriate—over human-assisted channels and counter services.
Read on to discover two recent use cases when they further improved efficiency and CX.
Social Housing Done Right
The Council has more than 20,000 social housing properties in Edinburgh, and their contact center processes more than 100,000 requests for housing repairs on an annual basis.
Fulfilling all these requests via employee-assisted channels would be resource-hungry, expensive, and unsustainable. Some of these requests are for emergency repairs, so the Council needed an intuitive and efficient workflow to complete these transactions as quickly as possible.
Today, the City of Edinburgh Council uses Verint for Citizen Engagement to deliver an integrated form that helps automatically transfer simple calls to the back-office system, while complex requests are passed on to an experienced agent to assist.
Thanks to the Verint solution, previously disparate applications—such as the booking or calendar system—are now integrated into the workflow, allowing employees to process requests faster and easier, without switching between tools.
Smart City that Works Smart
In June 2023, The City of Edinburgh Council successfully delivered a Smart City Operations Centre platform and two initial use cases, which saw the installation of 11,000 smart waste sensors and 1,500 property environmental sensors in 500 social homes of their smart city project.
The City of Edinburgh Council has also successfully integrated its existing third-party smart city platform with Verint for Citizen Engagement.
This project was one of several being delivered through the ‘Scotland’s 8th City—the Smart City’ European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Strategic Intervention. The development of a Smart City Operations Centre was partly supported by an 8th City ERDF grant enabling investment in a foundational platform and sensors to drive insight and proactive delivery of services.
“Edinburgh is committed to delivering best practices and was keen to avoid unstructured and potentially unhelpful data flowing through to service teams,” explains Karin Hill, Programme Manager for Customer Transformation at City of Edinburgh Council. “We wanted a platform to act as the single pane of glass, so data from different sources would be pulled together into a unified display, creating one view of the city to maximize efficiency and delivery of services. When we were talking about this concept initially, we used Verint as our example. Verint for Citizen Engagement had already provided the Council with a unified view of citizen requests, information, and interactions, creating a so-called ‘single view of the customer.’”
As part of the programme of work to deliver this project, the Council successfully integrated the Smart Cities platform with Verint for Citizen Engagement.
Sensors are able to trigger cases in the back-office system which can be proactively actioned as appropriate, enabling rapid service delivery for citizens across the authority. This integration and supporting data coming from platform reporting dashboards drives value and improves outcomes across the Council.
Technology at Your Service
As the City of Edinburgh’s Council’s example shows, the digitization of citizen services is not the future anymore: local governments around the world are already leveraging online, self-service platforms to enhance citizen engagement, drive efficiency, reduce costs, and realize quicker ROI.
The technology is available to help governments streamline their traditionally complex processes, reduce paperwork, allocate their resources more wisely, and deliver services more promptly.
To learn more about how CX Automation can create a win-win situation both for your organization and citizens, visit Verint for Citizen Engagement.