Civica at the heart of Spelthorne Borough Council’s flood response

Digital360 enables council to handle exceptional call volume and prioritise service delivery to vulnerable citizens

Spelthorne Borough Council in Surrey, with a population of almost 100,000, has a long standing working relationship with Civica. The 2011 integration of its Customer Services and Revenues personnel, using Digital360 in Revenues and Benefits, improved call response times generating savings of £200,000.

However, when serious flooding hit Spelthorne, triggering a huge surge in calls to customer services staff, the value and flexibility of the solution really came to the fore. Surging call volumes demanded a flexible customer contact system.

In February 2014 the River Thames flooded, damaging residential and commercial property and disrupting vital infrastructure such as roads and sewage pumping. This triggered 10,000 flood-related calls from the public to Spelthorne’s Borough Emergency Centre (BEC) in a 10-day period – equivalent to 3 months’ worth of calls.

I don’t think we’d have managed to handle the flooding half as well without Civica. I don’t know how my staff would have been able to capture the information. The key with Digital360 is that you can create a simple process in a matter of minutes…We didn’t have to bring the system down to implement change – we could do this while the system was up in real time."
Linda Norman, Customer Service Manager, Spelthorne Borough Council

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