Helping Nottinghamshire County Council meet changing citizen needs
Helping Nottinghamshire County Council meet changing citizen needs – CGI and Arch Floe
For a decade, CGI has worked in partnership with Nottinghamshire County Council to support their digital transformation.
Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) works hard to serve its citizens. [In recent years it has funded the maintenance of over 94,000 street lights, served over 8 million meals in its schools and helped 6,645 older and vulnerable people live more independently.]
Like many local authorities, NCC is managing this while navigating a period of great change. Each year requires new efficiency savings and that means reshaping the delivery of essential services for over 800,000 residents to ensure the highest possible standards are maintained.
Successful digital transformation underpins this and CGI has worked closely with the council for over 10 years to bring together many of the business critical systems using an integrated SAP solution.
Improving citizen services with Arch Floe
Introducing new digital services and improving communications with citizens is key for the council. One area for focus was its revenue and debt management processes and communications. The council wanted to improve communications with citizens when they were being contacted directly by email about payments and debt management and provide them with more digital payments services.
Arch Floe was chosen to enable this digital transformation, allowing the council employees to generate quickly and easily specific communications tailored for different citizen groups in pre-defined templates. Before the introduction of Floe, the system generated emails were functional in nature with the useful detailed information for the citizen in PDF attachments. The new Floe generated emails bring the useful information into the body of the email in a modern browser based format. This means fewer clicks for the citizen and also makes the email easier to digest on different devices. The communications were also more obviously identifiable as official council communications. New options available for payment such as online direct debit payments and ability to set a preferred payment method were provided to help payment compliance and prevent debt.
The changes have reduced outstanding payments and enabled staff to focus on responding to incoming enquiries and improved the experience of people making payments.
A trusted advisor
CGI has developed a strong relationship with Nottinghamshire County Council over the years, built on their collaborative working approach and drawn on our team’s many years of experience to understand the council’s needs.
Work is ongoing to ensure the local authority has the systems and tools it needs to drive its digital transformation journey forward and deliver positive results for employees and citizens.
“We are constantly evolving and embracing new technologies that allow us to work smarter and harder for the people of Nottinghamshire. Our relationship with CGI is very much built on a partnership and the work the team has done has played its part in enabling us to support the delivery of savings and improve citizen services.”
Sarah Stevenson, Group Manager, Business Services Centre, Nottinghamshire County Council
Key benefits:
- Smooth debt management and review process
- Improved efficiency
- Increased email response rates
Nottinghamshire County Council in numbers:
- 66 elected councillors
- Serving a population of nearly 800,000
- 56 electoral divisions
- 7 district councils
“CGI is a key partner for Arch and we have worked with them for many years now. They always deliver for their clients and offer tremendous value. This was another excellent project.”
Henry Blythe, CEO, Arch