We’re delighted to have been awarded a Certificate of Excellence at the iESE Public Sector Transformation Awards in recognition of our recent work with Buckinghamshire Council on helping to unify the fault reporting process between Buckinghamshire and its 171 parish and town councils.
Transforming fault reporting between authorities and local parish and town councils
This collaborative project involved developing some innovative new functionality for Buckinghamshire’s instance of FixMyStreet Pro, our street and environment fault reporting solution, to enable automatic triaging of reports to town and parish councils and better ways of passing reports between authorities.
The functionality shields Buckinghamshire’s residents from the confusion caused by trying to work out whether the local parish, town or unitary authority is responsible for a problem. It also eliminates the need for council staff to manually triage reports, leading to a more efficient user journey for all involved and reducing costs by cutting down administration and failure demand.
Crucially, this new development helps parish and town councils benefit from FixMyStreet’s ability to improve the reporting experience and close the feedback loop. Not only can residents now report problems out of hours, but the parish and town councils, who do not usually have their own CRM system, can respond to all reports simply by replying to the emails they receive, updating both the report and the customer.
Impact so far
In a short time, Buckinghamshire is already seeing benefits such as the elimination of duplicate reports between the unitary council and the parish/town councils and a vast reduction in progress chasing calls (already decreased by nearly 50% compared to last year).
For grass and hedge cutting reports alone, by reducing email administration and progress chasing calls into both the council’s Customer Service Centre and into parish and town councils, Buckinghamshire Council anticipates savings of circa £50,000 per year, not including the savings that will be made by the parish and town councils!
Lloyd Jeffries, Service Director (Business Operations) at Buckinghamshire Council said: “We have a published Customer Service Standard, this new process is part of our Customer Promise and definitely makes reporting issues easier by joining things up for our customer, both inside the council and with our local partners. In addition, we have seen a significant decrease in progress chasing calls from the public, compared to the same period last year. We are using technology to get the report to the right team, as well as managing customer expectations at the first point of contact. This is a game changer!”
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