South Staffordshire District Council Digitizes and Automates Services with Verint

The benefits

Once implemented, South Staffordshire District Council was able to offer self-service capabilities to its customers. It not only accelerated channel shift, but also boosted efficiency. This included the seamless integration of the council’s address, mapping, payment, and billing systems with Verint’s Citizen Engagement solution.

The council’s web site highlights the top four transaction types based on customer activities (apply, pay, report, and request). This enables residents to easily find and request various services, such as garden waste collection, tree works permissions, council tax payments, fixed penalty notice payments, bulky waste collection, and more.

Garden waste was the first service to go live, permitting residents to sign up online for their garden waste bins to be emptied. As a result:

• 90 percent of residents who signed up did so online.
• 29,000 residents used the form within the first six months of its launch.
• Over $1 million GBP in added revenue income was generated.

Since the success of the garden waste service, South Staffordshire District Council has added another 15 online services. Thanks to Verint’s intuitive forms, the council receives a growing number of online requests, helping it to do more with less and easing the burden on employees.

Further, thanks to the council’s customer experience improvement program, it enhanced its compliance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI). With the best-of-breed CX automation gained through Verint for Citizen Engagement, the council now addresses FOI requests more efficiently and effectively.

“The Verint solution is set up to remind customers and service agents of the 20-day deadline as the countdown proceeds,” concludes Hubery. “Another advantage is that both the requests and the responses to the requests are all captured within the same system. Previously, it was a very manual system.”