Blackpool Council is making a positive impact on the lives of the customers it serves, particularly those in most need of its help. Underpinning its Customer First programme and full commitment to the Government’s Transformational Agenda, it has placed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Case Management technology from Lagan at the center of its strategy.

By adopting a shared service approach to improving frontline service delivery, the council has joined up its customer facing operations and established an integrated service for citizens, businesses, and incidents alike.

As a result, Blackpool Council predicts annual savings of £2 million through process efficiency improvements, and customer satisfaction levels have increased to 99.81%.

Customer First
Blackpool is one of Britain’s largest seaside resorts, attracting over 16 million individual visits each year. In 1998, Blackpool Council took over education and social services from Lancashire County Council following local government reorganisation. It is responsible for 142,000 citizens, 7000 local businesses, and a transient community of seasonal workers who take short-term jobs in many of the town’s hotel, leisure and tourist attractions.

As part of its Customer First and Transformational Government strategy, the Council is rebuilding itself, creating a culture change, and putting the customer at the heart of everything it does. In addition, the Council is implementing a comprehensive strategy to reinvigorate the town and promote Blackpool as one of the UK’s, as well as Europe’s, top leisure locations.

For many years, Blackpool Council’s customer service infrastructure was disjointed and residents contacting the council with a simple inquiry were often frustrated by the difficulties involved in gaining assistance. The lack of integration between departments and systems often left residents trying to contact a department without success, and if they got through, it was often to the wrong one, or they then had to speak to several different departments to deal with one simple issue. There were in fact 400 different phone numbers for departments across the council.

Phil Baron, Assistant Director for ICT and Customer Services, explains, "Our service processes were wasting money, taking too long, and frustrating the public, and we knew we had to do something different."

Blackpool Council committed to improving service provision, and recognised the need to make all services more accessible. The council knew that the answer was an integrated approach.

After an evaluation of suppliers, Blackpool Council chose Lagan’s CRM software to support its new Customer First strategy. The new integrated service went live in August 2004 and now offers a wide range of council services accessible from many different contact points: face to face, phone, email, internet and kiosks.

The Lagan system has been integrated with a wide range of council service systems and is an integral part of the council’s strategy for Customer Data Integration (CDI), corporate workflow and EDRMS.

Transforming And Joining Up the Benefits Service
Unusually, Blackpool opted to tackle the most complex service first: housing and council tax benefit. In fact, it decided to combine the entire benefits portfolio, including education and social care benefits.

"Blackpool Council has leveraged the Lagan technology to completely reengineer our benefits services end to end," explains Elaine Midgeley, Assistant Customer First Manager. "Putting all the customer facing benefits operations under one umbrella has streamlined processes and ensures that each citizen can be assessed just once, rather than multiple times."

Information is recorded in the Lagan system, which is tightly integrated with the main housing and council tax back office systems to enable information verification where required. This information is then shared with the social care and education benefits systems to ensure accuracy and consistency and a single customer benefits record.

Blackpool Council is now in the top quartile for benefits performance across England and Wales, with customer satisfaction levels exceeding 86% in the latest BVPI80 survey.

Extending The Shared Services Model
Having successfully transformed one of the most complex service areas within the council, Blackpool was able to deploy a plethora of other services at the Customer First center. These include council tax and business rates, planning and building control, street scene services, electoral registration, highways and street lighting, permits for skips and scaffolds, car parking, bus passes and parking badges, as well as environmental services and private sector housing.

Customer First is now handling over 1,500 face to face inquiries, 6,000 telephone calls and 150 emails each week. In addition, the team makes 125 home visits each week to deliver services to the elderly and disabled.

At every opportunity, the council has used the integration between Lagan and the service systems to achieve faster flow and reduction of failure demand in the process. Within Waste Services, for example, calls from the public regarding missed bin collections are not only logged in the Lagan system, they are automatically updated with the third party contractor responsible for collections within Blackpool.

"This tight integration of service processes has enabled Waste Services to effectively monitor the contract with the third party," says Midgeley. "As a result, complaints about refuge collection within the town are reducing. Indeed, the council has attained financial benefits in several areas of the deployment." She says, "Integrating customer contact into one point has enabled economies of scale and flow, with staff released to undertake more productive roles in other areas of the authority."

Changing Attitudes
The success and speed of the Lagan deployment has brought a quantifiable change in customer service attitudes across Blackpool Council. According to Midgeley, there is widespread praise for the provision of frontline service at Customer First with departments now able to concentrate on core operational roles – from processing planning applications onwards. Furthermore, the provision of home visits has enabled the council to provide new services – such as delivering information on potential planning applications to those who are house bound.

The Customer First team has reinforced this change in attitude by undertaking a broad training and awareness campaign: Turning the Tide. The team used this campaign to demonstrate the power of integrated systems, specifically in the council’s ability to deliver high quality, joined-up services for customers experiencing a life event – such as change of address or loss of job leading to the need for financial aid.

"The team ran 80 sessions, training 2,500 staff to demonstrate the power of the system," she says. "Blackpool has a highly transient population and the ability to support our citizens effectively during times of change is extremely important."

Future Transformation In Adult Services
Blackpool is not resting on its laurels, however, but continuing to transform other areas of its organization. A recent example of this is the decision to replace the existing Adult Services application with Lagan case management software. The council and Lagan have entered into a partnership to develop a solution to support the council’s practitioners and reduce the costs and increase the efficiency of delivering services to vulnerable adults within Blackpool.

The Lagan system will provide a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for referral, assessment, review, and service commissioning which will improve the quality of service delivered to the adult citizens of Blackpool. This includes providing social workers with a holistic view of all data and a consistent and accurate view of an individual. This is crucial for elderly people, given their uncertain health and the consequences a delay in the provision of services could have for them. The Lagan solution will also create workflow and task reminders to ensure critical steps in the delivery of service are completed, and third party service providers are managed. A comprehensive process audit trail and powerful data security provides a secure environment for sensitive citizen data.

Commenting on the reasons why Blackpool Council chose to adopt the Lagan solution for Adult Services, Phil Baron says, "There is a strong partnership between Blackpool Council and Lagan which began when Blackpool implemented the Lagan CRM solution for our Customer Services organisation three years ago. We have built upon this relationship and have extended our use of Lagan software to deliver our Adult Services case management needs. Lagan’s solution has proven itself to be a very flexible and highly configurable product which delivers real benefits to Blackpool.’’ The incumbent Adult Services application which the Lagan solution replaces required expensive code changes to amend business processes, but now Blackpool can amend processes in-house to match changing business needs, providing greater flexibility and saving money.

The system is based on service line and service process and is aligned to how people need to do their jobs rather than being focused primarily on legislation and the desire of some councils to concentrate entirely on meeting KPI targets. The system is based on dealing with the citizen and enabling it to be easy to use by those who need to use it.

The Lagan solution has put in place a framework that enables innovation and transformation of Blackpool's services so that citizens’ needs come first. Lagan provides a comprehensive, integrated solution which has improved the quality of service for the public of Blackpool and gives the council the confidence to build on this for the future.