Blog posts about Integrations

SocietyWorks has launched a new, dedicated installation of FixMyStreet Pro for Gloucestershire County Council, through which residents can report local street, highway and environmental problems. 

Gloucestershire County Council joins more than 30 other local authorities, highways agencies and other public bodies in using FixMyStreet Pro for managing inbound reports of local problems such as potholes, broken street lights and problems with highway drains. 

Integrated with the Council’s asset management system Confirm, FixMyStreet Pro’s intelligent, map-based interface will make it much easier for residents to accurately report a problem and stay updated on its resolution.

With all reports and their statuses displayed on the map, the ability to subscribe to existing reports and the automatic, nationwide diversion of reports that are the responsibility of another authority, FixMyStreet Pro will improve things for customers and help Gloucestershire County Council to better manage expectations, eliminate duplication of effort and reduce avoidable customer contact, freeing up staff time for urgent cases or to help residents who need additional support.

Designed as a progressive web app, residents can choose to use Gloucestershire County Council’s branded version of FixMyStreet Pro as a website or as an app, with no obligation either way.   

Cllr Dom Morris, cabinet member responsible for highways and flooding at Gloucestershire County Council said: “I am pleased to say it is now easier for people to report issues and keep updated on repair work. We are always looking for ways to be proactive and improve our highways services.

“This summer we have been trialling new methods to speed-up repairs and engineers have been working day and night to strengthen the road network. Fix My Street is another innovation that will improve things for our customers and boost efficiency. Keeping Gloucestershire moving is a top priority and the council are investing heavily in better roads for residents.”

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks said: “Since its launch in 2012, every feature of FixMyStreet Pro has been built to meet the needs of councils and their residents. No two integrations of the solution are the same, because no two councils are the same, but they all benefit from its incredible ability to create an end-to-end reporting process that’s as intuitive as possible. We look forward to seeing the impact the solution has for Gloucestershire County Council and its residents.”

–

Request a short demo to see how FixMyStreet Pro could work for your authority.

Buckinghamshire Council started using our FixMyStreet Pro solution to manage inbound street, highway and environmental fault reports in 2018. 

Over the years, Buckinghamshire has made the most of FixMyStreet Pro’s ability to flexibly  integrate with any number of other services and software by connecting it to several of its other systems for the benefit of residents and customer services staff. 

FixMyStreet Pro’s integration functionality is particularly useful for when councils want to switch suppliers behind the scenes, while keeping everything consistent and simple to use on the frontend for residents. 

In this case, Buckinghamshire wanted to introduce two new integrations with FixMyStreet Pro, without creating any turbulence for residents.

Alloy and FixMyStreet Pro

Buckinghamshire Council recently switched its highway asset management system from Confirm to Alloy. 

The integration between FixMyStreet Pro and a council’s asset management system is an important one, because data is shared between the two systems, enabling councils to keep residents updated on the status of their reports.

To facilitate a smooth transition, we did a few things to ensure that, as far as Buckinghamshire’s residents are concerned, nothing is any different. These included keeping the display of asset layers the same and maintaining a way to look up the Confirm report ID numbers for reports transferred into Alloy so that no information was lost or required rekeying. 

EvoClaim and FixMyStreet Pro 

EvoClaim is a solution used by Buckinghamshire Council to manage claims from residents for injury or damage sustained to vehicles or property on a highway, so it made sense to incorporate this into the Council’s FixMyStreet Pro environment. 

“This has enabled us to achieve much needed time and resource savings”

This integration enables Buckinghamshire’s FixMyStreet Pro to act as the user-friendly and familiar frontend interface to claims submissions, using the FixMyStreet Pro map to locate the report related to the claim at hand. As with the other two integrations, FixMyStreet Pro sends all of the required data straight into the EvoClaim system.

Speaking about the integration, Amy Thomas, Insurance Claims Manager at Buckinghamshire Council, said: “The open communication and clear requirements/actions set by the project manager at SocietyWorks ensured we were able to meet our goal of implementing a new automated and integrated claim recording process. This has enabled us to achieve much needed time and resource savings.” 

Triaging to parish and town councils without integration

In the county of Buckinghamshire some local services are the responsibility of the unitary authority, while others are that of its 171 town and parish councils, of which approximately 84 are signed up to devolved responsibility.

Last year we introduced some new functionality to Buckinghamshire Council’s FixMyStreet Pro service to enable the automated triaging of reports to the appropriate parish or town council. 

As you can imagine, most small parish or town councils don’t have expensive management systems from which to manage inbound reports, making it hard for them to update residents on the status of their reports in the same way that Buckinghamshire Council can via integration.

To ensure residents are kept in the loop no matter who receives their report, we also built some functionality to make it possible for parish and town councils to update reports via email using a special code in the subject line, which will correspond to the new status of the report.

–

Find out more about how integrations work between FixMyStreet Pro and our other digital solutions here.

A new integration has been completed for Brent Council between FixMyStreet Pro, which acts as the Council’s user-friendly, resident-facing front door to place-based defect reporting, and Continental Landscapes’ ATAK system.

Continental Landscapes is contracted by Brent Council to manage grounds maintenance for all parks and housing land. Previously, reports of those issues made via FixMyStreet Pro had to be manually keyed into the ATAK system.

By integrating the two systems, reports from residents, council customer services staff and on-the-ground inspectors of issues that are Continental Landscapes’ responsibility can be triaged automatically and managed more efficiently.

Getting reports to the right place

Understandably, most members of the public are not aware of which service is responsible for what problem, especially in places like London where there may be a number of different services responsible for overlapping issues. For example, in Brent, litter in the park might be the responsibility of Continental Landscapes, but graffiti removal might be the responsibility of another contractor.

One of the main advantages of the integration with the ATAK system is the way in which it ensures reports always go to the right place when made via Brent’s FixMyStreet Pro, or the national FixMyStreet service.

The integration enables asset layers to be added to the in-report map which correspond to different categories. Depending on the location of the map pin, category and asset selected, a report will be sent either directly into the ATAK system, or to another location as specified by the Council to ensure that the correct team can respond.

Brent Council’s version of FixMyStreet Pro is also integrated with Symology Insight and Veolia Echo, into which some other report categories are sent, such as potholes and fly-tipping on streets. 

FixMyStreet Pro can also automatically divert reports to Transport for London wherever necessary. 

Automatic status updates

As with all integrations into FixMyStreet Pro, any updates made to reports by staff within ATAK are then automatically fed back to the report-maker. FixMyStreet Pro also enables councils to set up automated response templates to reflect different statuses with an integrated system, which helps to easily keep report-makers informed of their report’s progress. 

All reports and their updates are shown to the public on the map to help reduce duplication and avoidable contact.

Brent Council introduced FixMyStreet Pro in early 2023 as part of a drive to improve its digital offering for reporting local street-based problems and accessing residential waste services online. The Council uses WasteWorks to manage inbound waste reports, requests and payments online, which is integrated with Veolia Echo and Capita 360.

Find out more about how integrations with all of our solutions work. 

A new integration has been completed for Central Bedfordshire Council between FixMyStreet Pro, SocietyWorks’ reporting service for street, highway and environmental faults, and Jadu, the Council’s website provider. 

The integration enables residents to report fly-tipping straight to Central Bedfordshire Council’s Environmental Services team using its existing installation of FixMyStreet Pro, 

Central Bedfordshire Council has been using FixMyStreet Pro since 2021 to manage reports about local issues, including potholes, broken street lights and blocked drains.

Previously, due to the nature of the information required, if residents wanted to use the service to make a report about an incident of fly-tipping, the Council was redirecting them to a separate form on its website.

Now, with the new integration in place, FixMyStreet Pro can send all of the information required by the Council’s Environmental Services team for fly-tipping reports directly into its Jadu system, while residents and customer services staff can enjoy a consistent reporting experience for all categories on the frontend. 

“Customers’ concerns are promptly and accurately populated in the back-end system automatically, streamlining processes and reducing manual back-office activities.”

– Sim Fountain, Digital Customer Excellence Programme Manager at Central Bedfordshire Council

The integration between Jadu and FixMyStreet Pro is the second to be set-up for Central Bedfordshire Council, with an existing integration in place between FixMyStreet Pro and the Council’s backend management system, Symology Insight.

Speaking about the integration, Sim Fountain, Digital Customer Excellence Programme Manager at Central Bedfordshire Council, said: “As part of our digital customer experience programme, we have been driving transformation across the council to optimise service delivery and enhance overall customer satisfaction. We want customers to be able to reach our services and self-serve 24/7.

“The FixMyStreet app is integrated with our corporate JADU Forms/Workflow/Case Management System to enhance our front-door point of contact. Enabling existing FixMyStreet customers to report Environmental Services issues through the app instead of being signposted to our online forms aligns with transformation work already carried out across this service.

“Customers’ concerns are promptly and accurately populated in the back-end system automatically, streamlining processes and reducing manual back-office activities.”

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks said: “Integration is at the heart of what we do. Over the past 15 years, SocietyWorks has been helping local authorities to innovate and get the most out of their digital infrastructure by working collaboratively with the wider industry to connect things together while keeping everything simple for citizens on the frontend. We are delighted to add Jadu to our ever-growing list of integrations we can offer to local authorities.”

FixMyStreet Pro is a map-based progressive web app, built flexibly to integrate with any number of different systems and software for local authorities, highways agencies and other public sector organisations. It is the only reporting solution capable of automatically routing reports to other authorities across the UK.

–

Find out about how we integrate with other systems or if you’d like to know more about FixMyStreet Pro, request a demo.

Peterborough City Council has broadened its partnership with SocietyWorks to handle domestic waste online through its new WasteWorks service.

Peterborough City Council has adopted WasteWorks, a new waste service from citizen-focused local authority services provider SocietyWorks, to improve the way residents access waste online. The new service will empower residents to easily self-serve reports and requests from any device, while helping the council to streamline processes, deliver faster resolutions and reduce demand on customer contact centres thanks to an automatic two-way flow of data from front to backend system.

Integrated directly into Peterborough’s in-cab system Bartec and branded to complement the council’s website, WasteWorks will allow residents to manage all of their waste requirements from one place, whether it’s to report a missed bin collection or to pay for a bulky waste collection – which is currently being worked on and set to be delivered later this year. Behind the scenes, the service will seamlessly feed information between citizen, administrator and inspector, helping the council to better manage expectations and close the feedback loop through automated notifications and intelligent tools for on-the-ground inspectors.

This is the second SocietyWorks service to have been adopted by Peterborough City Council, which has been successfully using FixMyStreet Pro to take reports from residents about street and highways problems since 2019. The council will be able to access both WasteWorks and FixMyStreet Pro reports from a central dashboard, which includes a live heatmap to track category, seasonal and area-based trends.

Councillor Nigel Simons, cabinet member for Waste, Street Scene and the Environment, said: “We are fully committed to improving waste services across Peterborough and as part of this commitment, we want to enhance the way residents access services online. The new WasteWorks service will make a positive difference and I would encourage residents to log on and see for themselves.”

Councillor Marco Cereste, cabinet member for Digital Services and Transformation, added: “We want to engage better with residents online and enhance the overall user experience. This is a big step forwards and just the start of improvements to our online services.”

Mark Cridge, Chief Executive at SocietyWorks said: “We’re thrilled to be working with Peterborough City Council again. By integrating both FixMyStreet Pro and WasteWorks into its line of business systems, the council and its residents will benefit from a truly joined-up reporting service that puts user-friendliness at its heart.

“Peterborough is a really forward-thinking council, and it’s been a real pleasure to collaborate with the team on this project and build a service that works around the real-life needs of residents and staff.”

Residents in Peterborough can access the new waste service right now.

WasteWorks is available to all UK councils. Request a demo to find out more.

Merton Council has joined a growing number of London boroughs using SocietyWorks’ FixMyStreet Pro service to process reports from residents about local environment issues.

Londoners living in the borough of Merton can now make reports about environment issues such as fly-tipping and graffiti via the council’s newly launched FixMyStreet Pro service. Developed by SocietyWorks, the subsidiary of civic technology charity mySociety, FixMyStreet Pro is focused on helping citizens be active members of their community by making it easy to report problems and closing the feedback loop between council and resident.

FixMyStreet is an extremely user-friendly platform, and it will make it even easier for our residents to play their part.

Councillor Natasha Irons, Merton’s Cabinet Member for Local Environment and Green Spaces

Merton Council is one of several London authorities to use FixMyStreet Pro and benefit from its intelligent functionality to handle the complex routing of inbound street and environment reports, automatically ensuring everything goes to the correct place, including being able to divert reports to Transport for London where relevant. With integration into Merton’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM system, FixMyStreet Pro acts as the user-friendly front door to environment reports, with a simple, fully-optimised interface that works perfectly on any device and facilitates a two-way flow of data so that report-makers can stay up to date with the progress of their reports.

Councillor Natasha Irons, Merton’s Cabinet Member for Local Environment and Green Spaces: “Merton is a great place to live, work and visit but, like all London boroughs, we’re seeing too many people abusing our public spaces with environmental crimes like fly-tipping and littering. We want everyone to take care and pride in their neighbourhoods and behave considerately, so that everyone can enjoy our great borough. FixMyStreet is an extremely user-friendly platform, and it will make it even easier for our residents to play their part.”

Mark Cridge, Chief Executive at SocietyWorks said: “FixMyStreet Pro provides London councils with a key opportunity to join a community of authorities and other agencies delivering a truly efficient and joined-up service. We’re delighted to welcome Merton into the FixMyStreet family, and we’re excited to continue working together to build a stronger, more active community.”

FixMyStreet Pro is now up and running in Merton. Residents can use the service to report local environment issues. 

–

Want to explore how FixMyStreet Pro could work for you? Request a demo with the SocietyWorks team here.

Bromley Council has partnered with SocietyWorks to launch WasteWorks, a new online waste service to take the rubbish out of handling domestic, bulky and green waste online.

Designed by SocietyWorks in consultation with Bromley Council, WasteWorks empowers citizens to manage their own waste online, thanks to a self-service system that is easy to use on any device and which adheres to government accessibility standards.

What residents can do via Bromley Council’s new waste service:

• Check their bin days;
• Report a missed bin collection;
• Request a new container;
• Make an enquiry;
• Pay or set up a direct debit for a green waste collection.

Integrated directly into Bromley’s Waste Contractor’s system and branded to complement the council’s website, WasteWorks acts as a user-friendly front door for residents to submit waste reports, requests and payments, while taking care of the complex data flow between different line of business systems behind the scenes.

The result is a dramatically improved user experience for residents and a significantly reduced burden on customer contact centre staff, who can break away from expensive manual processes and re-keying.

Plus, automated updates and templated responses make it easier for Bromley to manage expectations, handle seasonal demand and deliver a more transparent service, while internal dashboards and visual heat maps enable staff to track service levels and identify trends. 

Jim Cowan, Waste Services Contract Manager at Bromley Council said: “WasteWorks builds on the previous online reporting we had within our Waste Services area, offering our residents a level of self-service for our Green Garden Waste subscriptions which has been a long-held ambition.  The ability to adjust and tweak customer messaging and templates through the administration area allows us to respond quickly and keep the customers informed as we take them through the process, which helps us drive down those avoidable contacts and queries.”

Mark Cridge, Chief Executive at SocietyWorks said: “For councils that are, like Bromley, serious about improving citizen access to waste services online, WasteWorks is an essential solution that provides a real opportunity to achieve much-sought after channel shift, create savings and drive efficiencies for citizens and staff.” 

Residents in Bromley can access the new waste service right now – take a look.

WasteWorks is available to all UK councils – request a demo to see how it could work for you.

–

Image: Shane Rounce

FOI Works, our citizen-friendly FOI service for public authorities, can now integrate with the iCasework FOI case management service.

Back in 2018, we started working with Hackney Council on a new Freedom of Information service that would improve citizen access to FOI and which could be integrated into their existing case management system via an API.

That service is FOI Works, and we’re very pleased to say that we have recently added a new standard integration for it: iCasework.

What is FOI Works?

FOI Works is an unobtrusive, open-source FOI service for public bodies that provides a user-centred FOI request process, while intelligently leveraging already published information to reduce request volume. 

Acting as the easy-to-navigate front door to FOI for citizens, FOI Works integrates seamlessly with case management systems to help divert citizens to potentially relevant responses already published within the case management system’s disclosure log.

Through this integration, FOI Works also removes the need for authorities to do any manual data entry; sending requests straight through to the case management system and immediately allocating a case number to the citizen.

Integration with iCasework

After initially using the Infreemation case management service to manage their FOI requests, Hackney Council recently told us they were switching to iCasework. So, sticking to our promise of connecting our services up to whichever systems our customers choose, we jumped straight into expanding FOI Works’ integration workflow, allowing for a new API connection with iCasework.

While we made some tweaks to the software behind the scenes, the in-built flexibility of FOI Works meant that there has been little to no change or disruption to how the service works for the Council and its residents. This is important because it allows our public authority partners to grow with the software, rather than needing to change everything whenever new or alternative systems are introduced.

The future for FOI Works

Our top priority when it comes to providing public authority services is the citizen, so we’re always thinking about how we can ensure that no matter what integration is required on the backend, the citizen gets the best possible experience on the frontend.

Looking ahead for FOI Works, we’d like to partner up with another public body to build a disclosure log into the service to further ensure that no matter what’s going on behind the scenes, FOI Works can provide citizens with easy access to all of the information they seek, while at the same time helping authorities to reduce the quantity of duplicate or unactionable FOI requests submitted.

–

FOI Works can be procured as a bolt-on to any case management system for public authorities – find FOI Works on G-Cloud.

–

Image: Samuel Regan-Asante

As you probably know, earlier this month two unitary authorities replaced the two-tier council structure in Northamptonshire – an area where street and highways defect reports are managed via our FixMyStreet Pro service.

Integrated directly into Northamptonshire County Council’s asset management system of choice Yotta Alloy, FixMyStreet Pro, known as Street Doctor in Northamptonshire, acts as the all-important, user friendly front door for citizens who need to report any local problems. This being the case, as well as preparing for some behind the scenes rerouting to ensure that reports would go to the correct place for the two new councils, the pressure was on for the SocietyWorks team to ensure that there would be no interruption to the service for citizens on 1 April when the two councils came into effect.

So how did we do this?

Preparing for the split

One of the main reasons citizens prefer to use FixMyStreet to report issues to the council is that they don’t need to know which council is responsible for what problem, so our first priority was to understand where FixMyStreet would need to send reports after the split, all based on category and location data provided within reports. 

Our MapIt service, which FixMyStreet uses to match councils to the area for which they’re responsible, would have the new authority boundaries in place from 1 April ready to direct reports to the correct council.

The new councils, North Northamptonshire Council and West Northamptonshire Council, were each to absorb responsibility for Northamptonshire’s district councils, which meant writing some code that would work out which council was previously responsible for an issue, and ensuring that those reports continued to go to the correct place until such time as the new councils have designated a new way to receive them.

Next we created two new bodies for North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire, covering their respective district areas and ensuring the report categories were the same across both for consistency. For highways issues, we renamed the existing Northamptonshire County Council body to Northamptonshire Highways.

On the front-end, our design team rebranded Northamptonshire’s instance of FixMyStreet Pro to align with the two new unitary councils. Instead of creating a new website for each council, both councils would be represented on the existing Street Doctor site, making it very easy for citizens to make a report – they wouldn’t need to search for a new place to make a report, nor would they need to know which of the new councils is responsible; we would work all of that out for them.

As before, the website would work seamlessly on any device, giving citizens the ability to make reports wherever suits them best, while helping the new councils to drive channel shift and continue to create savings.

It all comes together

North Northamptonshire Council and West Northamptonshire Council came into being on 1 April 2021. On that date, citizens in Northamptonshire needing to report local problems such as potholes, broken street lights or graffiti were able to do so with no disruption. 

The updated version of Northamptonshire’s FixMyStreet Pro went live at midnight on 1 April, providing citizens with a familiar, easy-to-navigate place to make reports to the two new councils.

At the same time, the new boundary areas were set on MapIt, ready to ensure that reports went to the correct council. These boundaries may be updated again as standard after the upcoming local elections should there be any changes.

–

Got a question about FixMyStreet Pro? Ask away.

The SocietyWorks team has always been very confident in FixMyStreet Pro’s ability to create real, positive change for councils. Better user experience, more intelligent use of data, easier case management for council staff and dramatic savings – and that’s just to name a few.

But of course, the proof is always in the pudding. So we were very pleased to hear recently that, since making the switch to FixMyStreet Pro, Buckinghamshire Council has seen a significant improvement to their customer user journey when it comes to online reporting of highways defects. As a result of this, the Council has been able to create over £32,000 in savings per year.

The story so far

Buckinghamshire Council chose to make the switch to FixMyStreet Pro back in 2018 as a way to improve their street and highways fault reporting customer experience. While residents still have a choice of channels through which they can make highways reports, the Council wanted to be able to offer the most intuitive digital process possible for reports that residents want and are able to make online.

Calls to Buckinghamshire Council’s Customer Service Centre about highways defects have decreased by 49%, which equates to over £32,000 in savings per year

It didn’t take long for FixMyStreet Pro to start delivering against Buckinghamshire’s desired outcomes. Since launching the service, calls to the council about highways defects have decreased by 49% – a clear sign that the online user experience has improved. In fact, for street light defects in particular, calls have decreased by 58%, more than likely helped by the Council’s intelligent use of FixMyStreet Pro’s asset layers, which can display ID numbers for street lights (as well as a number of other assets) to help the user make an accurate selection on the map and reduce duplicate reporting.

The benefits of this improved user experience stretch beyond just the user; for the Council itself the cost per highways report has dropped by up to 98.69%, taking an average report cost down from £7.81 to just 9p. According to Buckinghamshire Council, this equates to over £32,000 in savings per year. So it’s a win for the user and for the Council – and that’s what we love to hear.

What’s next for Buckinghamshire Council and FixMyStreet Pro?

We’re so delighted that FixMyStreet Pro has had such an impact on Buckinghamshire Council already, but we’re not stopping there when it comes to improving things even further.

In light of how successfully FixMyStreet Pro has improved the user experience when it comes to reporting street faults, we’ve been looking into how we could do the same for the process of making claims, too. Buckinghamshire residents can already make claims online to the Council about highways defects, but compared to the defect reporting process, the making a claim process could be much more user-friendly for both residents and council staff. Currently, residents need to provide lots of information up-front, even before it has been established that the claim can be upheld, while staff have to copy information over from the claims form into the Council’s backend management system Confirm, which includes downloading and re-uploading attachments.

After running some service discovery sessions on this, we’ve already made some progress here by improving the connection between Buckinghamshire’s existing claims form and Confirm to drive efficiencies for officers. The next step would be to expand our integration with Confirm and allow users to be able to file an incident report within FixMyStreet itself, as well as reporting the highways defect that caused the incident.

As always, we’ll let you know how the development on this project goes, and hopefully we’ll have some more positive results to share with you in the future!

—–

If you’d like to find out more about FixMyStreet Pro and have an informal discussion about how the service could work for you, book a short demo here.

Image: Samantha Borges on Unsplash