Transforming Waste Services (and 50 other processes)

David Spilsbury, Applications and Web Team Manager, Cherwell and South Northamptonshire Councils, outlines how a digital transformation that began with waste services now offers citizens self-service to over fifty council services.

Cherwell District and South Northants councils share a Content Management System (Jadu Central), but have distinctive cherwell.gov.uk and southnorthants.gov.uk sites. The two sites use similar themes but are independently branded and serve their respective audiences - which is made possible by Jadu Galaxies.

We wanted to offer residents 24/7 access to online services and enable effective self-service. The aim was to reduce the amount of council admin (and associated costs), while increasing customer satisfaction levels.

So, we moved from a joint legacy CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform and separate eforms product, to JADU Connect (Content Experience Management) and JADU Central (eforms).

Starting with waste services, we integrated with Uniform from Idox and Collective from Bartec.  Uniform stores and processes all Regulatory Services data in a single, central database. Collective enables the council waste teams to control their whole service in one place using comprehensive planning, operations, finance and customer service features.

The integrations provide refuse collectors with mobile working tools and information flows easily as everyone works from the same data. The standard reporting tools and tight integration with financials cuts admin and gives better control over service provision.

Because JADU Connect keeps users fully up to date with the status of their service requests and interactions with the council, people are choosing to use digital as the first port of call. As a result, we’re reducing reliance on contact centres and answering the calls that do come in quickly (and reducing abandonment rates). We’re also seeing an increase in satisfaction with the booking processes and the services themselves.

Outcomes June to December 2019 (average both councils)

The digital transformation began with waste services but we’ve now moved over 50 more processes, including: Abandoned Vehicles, Antisocial Behaviour, Complaints, Customer Service Feedback, Dog Services, Food Safety, Fly Tipping, Environmental Services, Pest Control, FOI Requests, Street Cleaning and are now working on Leisure Bookings.

Rather than simply lifting and shifting from platform to platform, we’ve re-mapped and improved the processes. We moved to a solution that is not heavily dependent on technical IT know-how and which we can maintain. This ‘low-code’ approach is important in enabling us to iterate services and for us to continue improving satisfaction levels.