29th July 2020
Digital360 enables Council to handle exceptional call volumes, redeploy employees and move to home working in under a week.
Spelthorne Borough Council in Surrey, with a population of almost 100,000, has a long standing working relationship with Civica. The benefits and flexibility of Digital360 came to the fore when serious flooding hit Spelthorne in 2014. This triggered a huge surge in calls to customer services and helped the Council prioritise service delivery to vulnerable citizens.
With the onset of COVID-19, Civica’s Digital360 CRM software has once again proved its value. The Council was faced with implementing Government measures to keep employees safe at a time when their call centre was experiencing a 75% increase in calls.
Daniel Dredge, Systems and Digital Innovation Manager at Spelthorne, assisted in moving the entire call centre team to home working in just one week and also ramping-up service capacity to ensure effective support for citizens.
The scale of the impact from COVID-19 put the Council on an emergency footing and resulted in an extra 4,000 calls hitting the contact centre in one month. Whilst this is enough of a challenge on its own, we also needed to manage the transition of our entire call centre team to home working and accommodating redeployed staff from other council services, including Elections, Legal, Planning and HR, all on a very strict timescale.
Using Digital360, Daniel was able to build and implement new call scripts in under a day. These included responses to six of the most common queries and supported experienced and redeployed employees alike in efficiently triaging incoming calls, often resolving them at first point of contact and only passing enquiries to the back-office where necessary.
Being able to quickly create a working solution that bridged the gaps in skill-sets from staff not used to the nature or complexity of our particular duties, made it possible for us to maintain a consistent service during a period of unprecedented disruption,
Daniel added.
Chris Owen, Managing Director for Civica Digital Solutions, said:
We’re proud to have played a part in helping the team at Spelthorne Borough Council respond quickly and positively once again to an unprecedented challenge. Digital360’s powerful workflow automation and back-office integration is helping 130 councils in the UK to transform service delivery, reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies every day.