Featured Case Studies - Swale

Swale Borough Council serves over 126,000 citizens in North Kent, England. It provides local government services such as public housing, planning, parks maintenance, waste disposal, building regulation enforcement and maintenance of the electoral register.

Service improvements by Swale Borough Council have raised customer satisfaction to 98 per cent, up from 78 per cent. Some 25 services are now delivered electronically and the council has received the prestigious Electronic Government Award.

Swale achieved this success by working with Singularity and Northgate to integrate its front and back office systems and re-engineer a range of business processes. The result is streamlined service delivery, with extensive automation, providing better service at lower cost. Information is no longer paper-based, and customer requests are processed across departments and locations without loss of data integrity. People receive decisions more quickly, and the new processes are flexible to evolve easily with the council’s future needs.

BETTER SERVICE AT LOWER COST

The transformation began by addressing how services were presented to citizens. Swale, on the north Kent coast, was providing customer services through several channels. People had to call a variety of numbers to make enquiries and access services. This frustrated customers and staff. Just as damagingly, it was at odds with government performance initiatives such as Best Value, the ODPM Priority Service Outcomes and the Gershon Review. Change was essential, and the first step was the Customer Service Centre, created round Northgate’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, which simplified customer access.

The CRM solution gave customers a single point of contact for the Council, and they could reach it via any convenient means — telephone, internet, email, fax, post or walk-in. Enquiries could be resolved more quickly because staff now had a single view of the customer, with all key information accessible via an easy to use interface.

SEAMLESS SERVICE FOR 126,000 CITIZENS

The next step was to integrate this front office activity with back office delivery, using Singularity’s business process management (BPM) solution, the Singularity Process Platform. There was also a need to upgrade internal services, such as recruitment, expense administration, invoicing and corporate complaints. This meant a number of staff systems had to be integrated. Everywhere, the key to efficiency was to replace disjointed, manual and paper-driven processes that required several hand-offs between departments.

The Swale solution is based on a corporate workflow built around Singularity’s best-in-class BPM product suite and Northgate’s front office CRM system. Singularity’s technology accelerates processes, increases automation and accountability, and reveals process performance more clearly and quickly.

By modernising service delivery through this technology, Swale have seen more than 60 business processes re-engineered. Its 126,000 citizens can now access twenty-five services seamlessly through the Customer Services Centre, with more coming online monthly. The change has also transformed how the back-office functions co-operate to achieve their service targets.

Just as significantly, this technological revolution has been accompanied by a shift in Swale’s organisational culture to ensure that the customer experience is a pleasurable one.

Swale wants to see its service quality recognised nationally, and development is continuing with Northgate and Singularity.

"The joint Singularity/Northgate solution has been a significant factor in the success of our service transformation"

Swale Council