Swale Borough Council Delivers Better Service to Citizens at Lower Cost

By modernizing its service delivery, the Swale Borough Council has transformed how back-office functions cooperate to achieve service targets. Through Kofax TotalAgility^® the Council has now streamlined more than 60 business processes. Service improvements by the Council have increased customer satisfaction levels from 78% to 98%.

Swale was providing customer services through several channels, which meant people had to call a variety of numbers to make inquiries 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 to improve business process management overall and simplify customer access by implementing new, automated customer service center capabilities, based on Northgate Information Solutions’ customer relationship management (CRM) solution.

Swale worked with Kofax and its partner, Northgate Information Solutions, to integrate the Council’s front- and back-office systems, as well as re-engineer a range of business processes. Automation streamlined service delivery, providing better service at lower cost. Now that Information is no longer paper-based, customer requests are processed across departments and locations without the loss of data integrity. People receive decisions more quickly and the new processes are flexible enough to evolve easily with the Council’s future needs.

With a single point of contact in place, the next step was to integrate this front-office activity with back-office delivery. Using Kofax TotalAgility, Swale could upgrade internal services by effectively integrating a number of existing Swale systems such as recruitment, expense administration, invoicing and corporate complaints. Everywhere, the key to efficiency was to replace disjointed, manual and paper-driven processes that required several hand-offs among departments. TotalAgility integrated with Northgate’s CRM, accelerating processes, increasing automation and accountability.

The CRM solution enables inquiries to be resolved more quickly because Swale staff now have a single view, with all key information accessible via an easy-to-use interface. While the citizen can contact Swale via any convenient means—telephone, internet, email, fax, post or walk-in—the CRM offers a single point of contact for the Council, equipping staff to offer better citizen service.

By modernizing service delivery, Swale has transformed how the back-office functions cooperate to achieve their service targets, as well as streamlined more than 60 business processes. Service improvements by Swale Borough Council have raised customer satisfaction to 98%, up from 78%. Some 25 services are now delivered electronically and, in response, the Council has received the prestigious Electronic Government Award.

The Council wants to see its service quality recognized nationally and development is continuing with Northgate and Kofax.

Northgate Information Solutions is the UK’s leading provider of specialist software and IT services for the human resources and public services markets. Northgate, which works with 80% UK local authorities and all UK police forces, has three major divisions: Northgate HR, Northgate Public Services and Northgate Managed Services.

The joint Kofax/Northgate solution has been a significant factor in the success of our service transformation, according to Council representatives.

Northgate Information Solutions plc, a Kofax partner, is the UK’s leading provider of specialist software and IT services for the human resources and public services markets. The Group has three major divisions – Northgate HR, Northgate Public Services and Northgate Managed Services. Northgate works with 80% of U.K. local authorities and all U.K. police forces.