Harrow Council reduces customer services budget by £2m

4th January 2017

91% of customer contact, across all channels, handled at first point of contact

“Harrow has an extensive investment in Civica’s EDM and Workflow capabilities which underpin many of our core services,” says Ben Goward, Director of IT at Harrow Council. Digital360 is currently managing processes in Housing, Revenues and Benefits, HR, Payroll, Planning and Business Support.

Its initial implementation saved £2 million in year one and played a key role in moving 80% of citizen requests to self-service under the ‘Access Harrow’ project. The programme focussed on transforming citizen contact by improving access to council services and adding greater levels of process automation across all channels including telephony, walk-in, paper and web.

Civica is now supporting Harrow to close its existing data centre and deliver on its wider ICT modernisation strategy. Civica will manage Digital360 on Microsoft Azure, removing the infrastructure burden from the Council. Migrating to the new cloud version of the software will also help Harrow cope with increased demand for flexible and responsive services. The solution is designed for remote access using any connected device, which will improve experience for officers and residents alike.

Key outcomes:

  • Improved customer satisfaction with 91% of customer requests, across all channels, handled at first point of contact
  • Significant savings with £2m being taken out of the customer services budget
  • 80% of transactions are now being done via self-service
  • Reduced citizen service request handling time by eliminating redundant manual tasks, e.g. re-keying, multiple searches
  • Improved citizen access by integrating delivery of key council services via multiple channels
  • Enriched Management Information across the full service request lifecycle
  • Contact centre processes guided and enforced delivering improved consistency of citizen service
  • Citizen records consistent across applications
  • Front office and back office systems and processes linked.
We are moving technology services to the public cloud and striving to become more agile and responsive to customer needs whilst also reducing costs. Civica have been a strong partner in this, supporting our move to their latest Digital360 web platform in an agile and cost-effective manner."

Ben Goward, Director of IT, Harrow Council

Read the case study