West Lindsey resloves queries 20% more quickly with Lagan
Posted: Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 12:03 pm
West Lindsey District Council in Lincolnshire has successfully gone live with the first phase of a three phase Customer Relationship Management implementation from Lagan that is already enabling the Council to provide a more efficient service to a greater volume of customers – with 8 fewer staff.
Bringing back office services to the front line, and enabling staff to resolve enquiries at the first point of contact, means the council is now able to handle an additional 200+ customer enquiries every week. The Lagan solution forms part of West Lindsey District Council’s plans to provide a single point of contact and a more superior level of customer service to its 84,000 citizens, as well as meeting targets set out in the Transformational Government strategy. The overall contract, including support and maintenance, is valued in the region of £237,000.
Lyn Marlow, Customer Services Manager at West Lindsey District Council comments, “One of our principal drivers for the CRM implementation was to reduce the number of contact points for our citizens. To date, there have been seven disparate receptions, one for each directorate across the Council. By bringing services together, enabled at the front line by Lagan’s CRM solution, we are able to offer our customers a more coherent and consistent service. The turnaround time that it takes to resolve enquiries has already been reduced by 20%, and we anticipate further reductions as staff become more familiar with the system and the new processes it enables. We can also deal with the enquiry at the first point of contact without the necessity of transferring customers around the authority for their various enquiries.”
West Lindsey’s front line agents have been dealing with an average of 2000 enquiries per week in total, in relation to services including Environmental Protection, Waste Services, Corporate Complaints, Payments, Licensing, Council Tax, Planning and Housing, some of which have now gone live on the Lagan system and the remaining ones going live with the completion of phase two of the CRM implementation. The third phase of implementation will concentrate on expanding the current available processes for self service for West Lindsey’s citizens by integrating the CRM system with the Council’s website, thus reducing the number of face-to-face enquiries and allowing the Council to focus on delivering a better service overall. Additional plans to enable shared services and cross-county benefits are also being planned.
Lyn Marlow explains, “In procuring the CRM solution with neighbouring District Council, North Kesteven, we have taken the initial step towards our future vision of promoting shared services in the County. By having the basic, fundamental processes in place on the same technology platform we can move into that arena as and when it is required, meeting the Government’s partnering agenda. This also delivers the potential for further resource and cost reductions.”
Concluding on the relationship with Lagan, Lyn Marlow comments, “Lagan has been very responsive at every stage of the selection and implementation phases. This was an important, strategic implementation for West Lindsey, which will enable us to reach Government targets and ultimately provide citizens with an excellent service.”
