Councils combine to streamline services

Councils in Suffolk are combining their infrastructures to cut costs and provide better services to customers - without pushing up council tax.

Suffolk County Council and Mid Suffolk District Council have created a joint venture with BT called Customer Service Direct (CSD) which has taken responsibility for finance, human resources and ICT from both councils.

Although CSD manages 800 staff they are not outsourced but seconded from the councils. The joint venture will allow the councils to deliver services to the public. As a result, citizens won't have to figure out which authority to approach with a query.

CSD CEO Bob Cunningham explained the thinking behind the venture: "The public doesn't understand the structure of local government and in most cases shouldn't. It's difficult for customers to get decent service because they don't know where to go in the first place."

Cunningham said the 10-year partnership deal will help the councils hit the efficiency savings demanded by central government.

"We are transforming service delivery internally and externally by driving efficiencies through the back office over the next two to three years. The overall dynamic of the deal is that it is cost-neutral in council tax terms. They are going to get hugely improved services delivery," he said.

CSD recently opened a customer service centre, featuring technology from IT services company CGI, integrating county and district services so that people in Suffolk can have queries answered at the first point of contact. It is also working on back-end infrastructure and improved customer relationship management (CRM).

"The transformation of IT is key, because IT is a key enabler of much of the service improvement. The migration to the new systems is enabling us to deliver multi-channel access," Cunningham said.

Cunningham said the plan with CRM is to start relatively shallow but very broad - CSD plans to have 400 services connected to its CRM system by the end of the year, which is considerably more than a private sector call centre might have to worry about.

"In government the big difference is that there is a vast number of services. To the average private sector CRM user this is mind-blowing - they might only have five transaction types," said Cunningham.

The councils are already seeing the benefits of the call centre as a central point of access for the public. During a cold snap earlier in the year the councils got hundreds of calls asking which roads were to be gritted: "People were sitting in gritting lorries and gritting roads whereas before that they would have been drafted in to handle telephone call," Cunningham said.

The next step is to work out how to take the interactions further. For example, instead of the call centre simply taking the details of a broken street light and passing them on through the workflow, the call centre could be booking the engineer to come and fix it.

This is something that will involve tacking the councils' legacy applications. "There's a huge amount of work to do," Cunningham said. He said CSD is also in discussion with other districts about how it can partner with them as well.