Brighton and Hove City Council (BHCC) had a clear vision: to successfully overcome a siloed approach to departments and data to make online access to services easier for its citizens – and to make them more personalised.
BHCC quickly identified that in order to improve customer experience, they would need a tool to help link vast amounts of information together. This project would need to deliver other benefits, including a reduction in the amount of manual processing needed, a reduction in customer complaints and significant annual cost savings.
The scale of the challenge:
34 separate departmental data sources using different systems
Mixture of common data and standalone data
Multiple formats and record types
Duplication of citizen information across systems
Lack of transparency of data quality
BHCC’s key data challenge was the ability to accurately combine data from multiple, disparate sources comprising multiple formats and record types into a single, verified and trusted customer view.
The solution
Infoshare’s ClearCore solution was selected as the core component to cleanse and match citizen data. It uses a unique, evidence-based approach to deal with the disparities between fields.
ClearCore provides an operational single view – including a ‘golden customer record’ – of consolidated data that is drawn from the best or most reliable information across all the source systems. BHCC will be able to master its citizen data and deliver efficiency and effectiveness improvements, as well as increase capacity to adapt to changing demands for services.
“We will be effectively using ClearCore and the Customer Index to highlight to each department what they need to do to make improvements in data quality. This includes process and system changes that need to be implemented”
Gary Duckworth, Customer Index Project Manager, BHCC 2
ClearCore and the Customer Index will give us a single view of our citizens so we can provide a better service – rather than having multiple, unrelated, separate records. By logging into ‘My Account’, people will be able to see joined-up information about their transactions with the council.
We hope this will allow them to find the information they need and request the services they want, quickly and efficiently – avoiding unnecessary contact and reducing frustration. All this should lead to better customer satisfaction through a much-improved customer experience
Richard Clarke, Programme Manager, BHCC 3
The benefits
The Customer Index will combine data that links individuals across council services. BHCC’s employees will no longer have to search across multiple systems, reducing admin and improving efficiency. Notification of a citizen’s change of circumstances will be accessible across the authority; and identifying discrepancies across BHCC’s systems will provide information to help reduce fraud.
The improvements achieved throughout this project will generate 3 key benefits:
- Improved fraud detection and prevention – Cross-departmental system data flows
• Forecasted annual cost savings of £7 million - Improved operational efficiency – Better data quality will lead to time and cost savings
• Auto-population of input methods will enhance the quality of data capture
• Automation of tasks will lead to seamless data cleansing processing
• Shared data access will deliver improved inter-departmental communication
• Expected reduction in staff processing time
• Expected annual cost savings of £300k-400k - Improved customer experience – Easier citizen access to services
• Will deliver a more personalised experience
• Will enable better communication across departments and services
• Data will underpin a new online citizen portal – supporting the ‘Customer First’ programme
• Expected reduction in complaints
Continuous improvement
BHCC’s initial vision was to overcome a disjointed approach to how data was being managed and used across departments. During this project, however, other uses for ClearCore and the Customer Index have been uncovered, including for fraud prevention purposes, to enable citizens to update their details across the Council via a single contact point, and to help in identifying troubled families.
Using the system for fraud detection and prevention alone is aiming to realise annual cost savings of approximately £7 million.
This is still a live project and BHCC has a continual development loop in place to ensure that departments and processes are revisited to improve them further – and to identify more projects and other uses to integrate into the solution.
