Supercharge your case management with Civica Digital's Dynamics practice

Brian Parkes, Head of Workplace Productivity explores how Civica is enabling public services to save time and money with Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Despite shrinking budgets in the public sector, the demands from citizens on the services they receive are ever-growing. Driven by rich user experiences with mainly tech-savvy organisations, citizens expect near instant response times, self-service and the ability to communicate via multiple channels. In turn, these expectations are having a big impact on how organisations handle and process customer interactions.

Organisations that ask stakeholders to explain their issue to multiple agents because they don’t have access to a previous case history are declining. Organisations embracing a digital work model are beginning to see a continued ability to innovate and improve efficiencies, ultimately helping to progress alongside the rate of change.

Why Microsoft Dynamics 365 for case management?

Due to the large scale investment required, many public sector organisations are not always able to build bespoke applications. Rather, many are leveraging the benefits of Out of the Box (OOB) applications, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, to improve efficiencies and deliver better outcomes. Customising existing applications to suit unique requirements can be delivered at a fraction of the cost when compared to full development

Microsoft Dynamics 365 has been built from the ground up to be extendable, enabling organisations to use OOB features and functionality quickly whilst also extending it to suit future requirements. Using these OOB capabilities in Dynamics 365, we have helped Natural Resources Wales improve their management of multiple permitting processes by delivering a single view of all activity across Wales in just 12 weeks. 

Today Microsoft Dynamics 365 is helping public bodies improve user expectations through:

• Enhanced information – previous history and current state is organised in a way that makes information accessible to the case worker.
• Multi-channel support – capable of receiving and updating citizen requests through multiple channels including telephone, e-mail, website and mobile applications.
• Improving speed of response – through automation and productivity improvements that help ensure citizens get the best service.

The Cloud solution to improve productivity and reduce cost

The real challenge in the public sector however is not in creating a best of breed solution: it’s delivering against increased demand and expectations and against increasingly constricted budgets. As a cloud-based solution, Microsoft Dynamics is helping organisations leverage the full potential of the cloud with:

• Reduced development costs - leveraging existing OOB functionality rather than building a new system from the ground up.
• Platform ownership - thanks to a low code graphical UI, departments are better able to manage their own systems in-house with less reliance on partners and third parties.
• Economies of scale – online version allows public bodies to take full advantage of Microsoft’s continued investment in development with a system that is constantly updated. High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Active Threat Monitoring traditionally expensive to implement are centralised and included in the licence fee.
• Workflow automation – using user configurable workflow engines to execute defined business rules, reducing workload and improving consistency of application.
• Virtual agent – an artificial intelligence (AI) driven webchat client can handle the bulk of simple cases, providing instant response and freeing up human agents to handle more complex cases. Public bodies are better able to scale and meet fluctuations in demand.

• Productivity enhancements – it’s estimated that 40% of productivity is lost through interruptions and switching between different applications (American Psychological Association). Through natively integrating with Microsoft Office products, two-way integration with other systems and being able to surface information from other systems into a single view, Microsoft Dynamics provides a single consistent interface for case workers.
  
  

About Civica Digital
Civica Digital, a division within the Civica Group, helps organisations which deliver essential everyday services to rapidly transform their customer experience, improve operational efficiency and enhance performance through deeper business intelligence. Providing a complete end-to-end digital transformation capability – from strategy and analytics to designing, building and managing secure, integrated digital solutions – Civica Digital is a trusted digital partner for more than 500 organisations across both public and private sectors. Together we are transforming services and improving lives.