How Three Councils Are Digitally Transforming with Cloud Communications
Pablo Piccasso said, “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” The spirit of his statement is noble, but in today’s environment, we have the luxury of vastly more information that is easily accessible. Which means that now, we learn from YouTube.
Unfortunately, local councils are not chronicling their digital transformations and migrations to the cloud on YouTube. I’ll fill in that gap with a few examples that demonstrate how local councils are addressing an array of challenges using cloud communications. Hopefully, they provide useful insight into how cloud communications can help your organisation strengthen service delivery resilience at a lower cost, so you can learn how to do it without resorting to YouTube.
Accelerate digital transformation to bolster contact centre performance
“Customers live in a digital world where they bank and shop online,” explains Alison Hughes, Assistant Director for ICT, Digital & Customer at Liverpool City Council. “And there’s an expectation we’ll deliver our services the same way. With a digital approach, we can also use our resources more effectively, whilst ensuring that those people who require more help and support to interact with us are not left behind.”
With this in mind, the local authority set out on a digital transformation journey to better understand its residents, tailor their experiences, and ultimately provide the best possible service to them.
The challenge: legacy system proves inflexible
The council’s contact centre is its “voice,” but the legacy system delivering it was ready for replacement. “It was clunky,” says Hughes. “We’d have to log into different modules for aspects like quality monitoring, while important customer information was siloed. We had no upgrade path and the changes we wanted were either costly or impossible to deploy.”
Problems became more evident during the coronavirus pandemic. The workload soared as the contact centre team and their colleagues from public-facing council offices and drop-in centres needed to manage business grants, support vulnerable people, manage food hubs, and run a host of other critical services.
Staff needed to work from home, but the legacy system required a Virtual Private Network to be installed on each employee’s computers — which proved a huge drain on resources. “This underlined our need for a new platform built for agility,” says Hughes.
The solution: 8x8 Contact Centre
8x8 worked with the council to go from user acceptance testing to launching the solution successfully for 190 employees within 33 days, alongside a robust business continuity plan. “It was a huge challenge, but the deployment team were brilliant,” says Laura Jones, ICT Programme Manager, Liverpool City Council.
"With 8x8, we've got so much more for our investment — far beyond telephony." - Laura Jones, ICT Programme Manager, Liverpool City Council
The results: everything on a single platform
Now, the council has a single contact centre platform for all customer communications, including voice, emails, and social media, and residents can access council services via a single portal.
“Our contact centre performance has been seamlessly meeting our key performance measures during this transition — and we’re bringing residents on our digital journey, which has led to their feedback improving too,” says Hughes.
The council plans to add secure phone payments, introduce live video calls with residents, and explore artificial intelligence and chatbots. Hughes adds, “A digital approach massively reduces costs for us because meeting in-person might cost £15, but dealing digitally or via telephony might just be pennies. Traditionally, data hasn’t been a priority for the public sector, but we’re excited about adding value through analytics to improve the customer experience.”
Fast-track transition to a cloud contact centre
Sefton Council employs over 3,000 staff and provides essential services to 275,000 citizens across its metropolitan borough of Sefton in Merseyside, north-western England.
The challenge: reacting quickly to maintain vital services
The local authority was planning to replace its ageing contact centre platform, but the sudden arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic made this an imperative. The council had to act swiftly to enable more staff to work from home while maintaining vital services to the community.
"I remember arriving at 7 am to an email that said we needed to create a virtual contact centre, immediately." - James Aldred, Procurement Manager, Sefton Council
Within hours, the council assessed the market, found the right solution, and got a deal together which fully met its commercial and service requirements. Sefton Council was on its way to delivering one of the fastest IT projects of its type ever seen in local government.
The solution: taking advantage of the flexibility of cloud communications
Working with Agilisys, the council selected the cloud-based, omnichannel Contact Centre from 8x8.
“Moving to this technology meant we could get our team working from home taking calls right away, with chat, email, and secure payment capabilities to follow,” explains Mark Quillan, Customer Service Manager.
A contract was agreed within just 48 hours — and less than 10 days later, 40 cloud contact centre agents went “live” with the ability to work from home.
The results: getting home-workers set up quickly
With 40 work-from-home contact centre agents taking and making calls, Sefton Council’s services continued seamlessly, and importantly, the team were able to continue to support people who were shielding.
"COVID-19 has created huge challenges for the public sector. But it's also presented a moment to rethink and transform specific services. The 'new normal' calls for extra safety, greater agility and enhanced services for citizens — which we've achieved with 8x8." - Paulette Lappin, Cabinet Manager - Regulatory, Compliance and Corporate Services, Sefton Council
Additionally, supervisors can now easily access extra functionality, such as being able to change the IVR, workflows, and call routing options, as the council's hours and recorded greetings have changed frequently during the pandemic.
With 8x8, Sefton Council isn’t just responding to COVID-19 — it’s transforming communications to increase first-time contact resolution and give its citizens the best-possible experience.
“We’ve got a robust and reliable contact centre platform with 8x8,” comments Quillan. “8x8 was responsive and focused on us as a customer and our outcome. They did all they could to make this a positive experience for us — and we achieved our objectives exceptionally quickly.”
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Enhance delivery of essential services
As one of London’s 32 borough councils, Harrow Council embarked on an ambitious digital transformation plan to improve the services provided to residents, businesses, and visitors.
The challenge: struggling to transition to remote work
The council was hampered by legacy on-premises systems that were unreliable, costly to maintain, and offered limited functionality. These technology shortcomings were further exacerbated when the council’s mission-critical “Access Harrow” contact centre and telephony system struggled to support employees and contact centre agents transitioning to remote work.
The solution: a unified, cloud-based communications system
With the decision to replace their legacy systems, Harrow Council selected 8x8’s integrated cloud contact centre and communications platform to improve manageability and reliability, ensure business resiliency, enable an operate-from-anywhere workforce, and lower costs. Working with 8x8, the council quickly equipped their 160 “Access Harrow” operators — who handle everything from missed garbage collection to helping residents pay their council tax — with the ability to engage customers across voice and digital channels while having a 360-degree view of customer needs and interactions. 8x8’s intuitive user experience and enhanced functionality helped make the deployment and adoption easy and seamless, even as most employees were trained remotely.
"Working with 8x8 has enabled us to adopt a nimble, hybrid approach, allowing our staff to work from anywhere while providing residents, businesses and visitors with the essential services they require." - Ben Goward, ICT Director, Harrow Council
The results: improving customer service while reducing costs
The result was a streamlined employee and customer experience with advanced analytics and reporting, allowing operators to consult and collaborate with colleagues to resolve customer issues through immediate access to relevant information.
Ben Goward, ICT Director at Harrow Council said, “As we made a smooth transition into the cloud, the 8x8 delivery team was with us every step of the way, ensuring we were ready to make the switch. The level of support they provided those initial weeks made what felt like a mammoth task more manageable. Working with 8x8 has enabled us to adopt a nimble, hybrid approach, allowing our staff to work from anywhere while providing residents, businesses, and visitors with the essential services they require.”
Read the complete press release.
Taking the next step
Recent events have made it clear that organisational and service delivery resilience depends on having reliable, secure cloud communications that enable connecting and collaborating from anywhere, using any channel (e.g. phone, chat, video, contact centre, SMS messaging), on any device.
As local councils implement their long-term strategies, selecting a cloud communications provider that ensures a reliable platform is a daunting challenge. Today, every vendor claims that they have one. How can IT leaders in local councils filter out the marketing noise and quickly identify the real, reliable platforms? Ask for a highly available, fully redundant solution, supported by a financially-backed 99.99% uptime SLA across BOTH contact centre and business communications.
The platform must also have the capabilities needed today, with the ability to support change and expansion as each local authority adapts to the needs of its community. This X Series Solution Overview provides all the details of the solution, including the deployment and support capabilities, as well as how local councils can use it to enhance service delivery resilience at a lower cost.
To learn more, visit us at 8x8.com.
