Customer Solution Case Study
/ / City Council’s New Integrated System Saves Time and Improves Customer Service
Overview
Country or Region:United Kingdom
Industry:Government
Customer Profile
Derby is a city located in central England. The Derby City Council provides more than 600 city services to its residents and uses a central administration center to handle service requests.
Business Situation
Derby City Council operators were using a time-consuming process of collecting caller data and responding to service requests. The Council needed a more efficient, consolidated system.
Solution
The Council worked with CIBER UK, a system-integration consultancy, to integrate the Council’s Web site and internal applications with Microsoft Dynamics™CRM and Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006.
Benefits
Better integration
Time savings
Increased productivity
Increased efficiency
Improved customer service / “This system has allowed us to save at least one minute per call. With more than 10,000 calls per year on just our pilot services, that equates to more than 160 hours saved for our operators annually."
Jason Gruber, Information and Business Solutions Manager, Central IT, Derby City Council
Derby City Council provides a range of services for the residents of the central England city of Derby. When residents call with service requests, customer service advisers from the Council provide them with information and set up appointments for specialist officers to carry out work. The advisers had been using multiple applications to collect caller data, however, and the time-consuming process caused many callers to simply hang up. The Council needed a consolidated system that would integrate residents’ addresses and other personal data updates automatically. To accomplish that goal, the Council turned to consulting company CIBERUK, which developed an integrated IT framework based on Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. As a result, operators have saved time and increased productivity while providing better customer service.
Situation
Derby, located in the East Midlands region of central England, is a city with a population of around 250,000. One of the UK's leading centers of technology and innovation, it is home to companies such as Toyota, Rolls Royce, and the online bank Egg. The Derby City Council works closely in partnership with other public and voluntary sector agencies, providing Derby residents with more than 600 city services, including social, school, environmental, and housing services.
Residents needing access to services can call in to the Derby Direct customer contact center, where customer service advisers provide detailed information, set up appointments, and create profiles for each caller’s case. A typical service area with a high volume of calls is pest control. For example, operators provide information on how to deal with different types of pests, offering tips on infestation prevention, or arranging for exterminator visits.
Personal data, such as address and type of service requested, had been stored in several local data stores used by different back-end systems. As a result, customers had to make several calls to different services for each service enquiry that they had. “The process was very inefficient because things were not centralized,” says Jason Gruber, Information and Business Solutions Manager, Derby City Council. “Customer support was not good, with abandoned calls being a particular problem.”In addition, separate worksheets for each customer were produced manually. And if a customer requested a service more than once, a new job sheet had to be filled out each time. “It was a time-consuming process, and there was a lot of duplication of activity,” adds Gruber.
Another drawback was that field officers responding to customer calls spent much of their time traveling between the administration center, pest control depot, and a customer’s residence.
The City Council decided to implement a new system that would automatically integrate a caller’s personal data across several systems. “We needed a solution that would allow our customer service advisers to propagate customer changes in a faster fashion,” says Gruber. “We also needed a system that would be scalable and flexible so that other components could be added in the future.”
Solution
After looking at several solutions and companies, Derby City Council decided to work with CIBER UK, an international system-integration consultancy. CIBER UK developed a project to tie together the city’s customer contact center, with other systems. CIBER UK was part of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP), which allows organizations to work closely with Microsoft on products and technologies prior to their release.
The new Customer Service Information System (CSIS), deployed in September 2005, is based on Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft Dynamics™CRM using Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006, part of the Microsoft line of server software. The solution integrates the City Council’s Web site and internal applications.
CSIS has been developed to support the City Council in centralizing customer service, with Environmental Services being the first service to be integrated late last year. CSIS uses Microsoft Office InfoPath®2003 to capture specific information from customers within CSIS. A BizTalk application directs service requests from customer service calls to an internal Microsoft CRM application.
“Operators receive automatic prompts as they go through an InfoPath form related to pest control or other services,” says Charlie James, Business Development Manager, CIBER UK. “For example, InfoPath guides the specific information about different types of pests to an operator.”
Once a mobile worker marks a particular service as accomplished, BizTalk Server is used, as part of an automated workflow, to update the case in Microsoft CRM. BizTalk maintains a live link between cases in CSIS and the specialist back-end systems, providing up-to-date information between specialist service providers and customer services.
In addition, through Microsoft CRM, advisers can immediately pull up a detailed record with information about a customer as soon as the call comes in. The CSIS also uses Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, so that operators can have a collaborative portal environment to store data and documents as needed. The Web site runs on Microsoft Content Management Server 2002.
Benefits
Derby City Council now has a fully integrated system based on BizTalk Server 2006. As a result, customer service advisers can handle citizen requests much faster, which has saved significant time and increased internal productivity and efficiency. This has led to a drop in the number of abandoned calls, with a subsequent improvement in overall customer care.
Better Integration
As part of the Technology Adoption Program (TAP), CIBER UK used BizTalk Server 2006 to quickly connect disparate systems and integrate smoothly with Derby City Council’s existing infrastructure. Because BizTalk Server generates a request with each new customer enquiry; the Council now has full integration all the way from the customer service end to the line-of-business application. “The CSIS basically picks up and organizes all the details so we can deliver a particular environmental service to a customer,” says Gruber. “It also provides flexibility in the way it communicates with external systems.” The result is a system that is easier to manage.
Additionally, the new system’s robustness gives the Council the ability to scale up and out very quickly, which sets the stage for the future. Plans for the future include the use of BizTalk Server 2006 as the central hub from which to integrate a range of departmental databases within a multiagency, citywide, spatial data warehouse.
Time Savings
The deployment of the new system was accomplished in less than two days. “All the installation and configuration was done by CIBER, and that saved us a lot of time,” Gruber says. More importantly, customer services have saved time as well. “This system has allowed us to save at least one minute per call,” he says. “We receive more than 10,000 calls per year on our pilot services, so that equates to more than 160 hours saved for our operators annually.” Big savings have also been realized because manual job sheets no longer need to be created. Gruber estimates that about 8,000 job sheets were produced each year, with each sheet taking an average of eight minutes to process. “Because we eliminated the need to create job sheets, we’ve saved more than 1,000 hours in work time annually,” he says.
The Pest Control Depot is about two miles from the administration center. Electronic transfer of service requests has reduced the need to travel, saving time and reducing fuel costs. Electronic exchange of information also speeds up work flows, resulting in an improvement in service quality. The reduction in administration center visits saves about 35 minutes a trip on average, which equates to a savings of about 90 minutes a week for each officer.
The Council’s training time has also been reduced. “It only takes one to two days to train a new operator,” says Gruber. “InfoPath and SharePoint link with the central knowledge base, giving users all the information they need by subject.”
Increased Productivity
The CIBER-deployed CSIS solution has also greatly increased productivity for the Council’s call center staff. During a pilot installation of the CSIS, the Council received 3,000 calls related to pest control and abandoned vehicles. The system allowed advisers to answer 87.9 percent of all calls, with only 12.1 percent of them abandoned. “Because the advisers spent less time overall on each call, we found that 82 percent of calls were answered within the customer service standard of six rings, which is above our target of 80 percent,” says Gruber.
Because the system enables electronic booking of pest control officer visits, the need to contact officers by phone has been reduced. According to Gruber, that ability offers the Council better work allocation and route scheduling for pest control staff, which improves officer productivity and reduces fuel costs. “Ultimately, we now have the back- office specialists working on the projects they need to work on, as opposed to helping with customer service calls, as they had done in the past,” he says.
Increased Efficiency
The functionality of BizTalk Server 2006 has also helped increase efficiency at the Council’s customer service center. For example, CSIS now has a database of customers who have called to request a service. If a customer calls the Council for a second time, contact details are already on file, making calls more efficient.
Derby citizens also have the option to pay for their services over the phone, at first point of contact. “This delivers a number of efficiencies, including increasing security by reducing the amount of cash carried by the officers in the field,” says Gruber. “Visiting times have also been reduced.”
Improved Customer Service
Because the single, user-friendly interface of CSIS fully integrates with the Council’s other systems, Council operators are able to handle Derby citizens’ calls and service requests much faster. There are fewer missed calls because callers no longer have to wait for a response.
The improvement in overall customer service has led the Council to explore additional projects with CIBER UK. “We’re working with them on other multiagency projects that deal with health services and career advisory services,” says Gruber. “We’re also looking to develop an integrated system that deals with neighborhood action teams and requests for fire and police services.”
According to Gruber, CSIS was only the beginning. “We’ve dealt at first with environmental service calls by using the CRM application, but ultimately we’ll enable all city agencies to have the same service,” he says. “For us, customer service is not just about CRM. It’s about knowledge management and collaboration, and we’re excited to develop more systems that bring all of those aspects together.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System is a line of integrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to: