South Staffordshire Council Achieves 84% Channel Shift and 30% Faster Case Response with Verint
South Staffordshire Council is a local government district in Staffordshire, England. The council is headquartered in Codsall.
Results
- 98%
Reduction in residents waiting over 20 minutes for a call to be answered.
- 84%
Channel shift for the Council’s top ten service requests.
- 30%
Improvement in the speed at which the Street Scene team respond to cases.
About South Staffordshire Council
South Staffordshire Council is a local government district in Staffordshire, England. The council is headquartered in Codsall.
South Staffordshire Council’s ‘Digital by Choice’ business transformation strategy, underpinned by Verint for Citizen Engagement, is delivering on its promise of agile, rewarding, and efficient public services. An 84% channel shift for its top ten service requests put it at the forefront of public sector innovation, with benefits including enhanced inclusivity and faster case response time.
Opportunity
Like almost every local authority, the Council needs to respond to increasing demand for more efficient and accessible public services amidst intense funding pressure on funds. One key challenge was to make it easier for residents to interact with the Council at a time that suits them. Telephone and in-person visits, for example, struggled to keep pace with demand – in particular because the contact centre service is available only from 9-5 p.m. Monday-Friday. The customer service team was consequently overwhelmed by the volume of customer contact, resulting in longer wait times and decreasing customer satisfaction. This made an innovative channel shift approach necessary.
Channel shift is an approach that encourages residents to use online self-service options where appropriate, such as customer portals, chatbots, and IVR, so they can quickly get what they need without creating extra manual work. By moving appropriate workflows to these automated channels, councils can reduce demand on the contact centre, lower costs, and free up staff to focus on more complex cases.
To measure this, Verint introduced the Verint Channel Shift KPI as the percentage of online (self-service) service requests compared to the total number of service requests for an organization’s top ten most popular service request types.
A digital‑first approach that leaves no resident behind
The Council knew that a draconian ‘digital by default’ approach (turning off face-to-face, postal, and phone channels) was not the answer: it would potentially exclude many hundreds of non-internet residents and prevent them from engaging.
Andy Hoare, Assistant Director of Business Transformation, explains, “We needed to balance a modern, digital-first approach to customer self-service and reduce pressure on valuable staff resources. This would help offset the needs of residents who still chose to use the more traditional contact methods.”
Rachel Maguire, Verint Product Owner, Digital Services, adds, “We wanted to encourage more residents to embrace accessible digital options with confidence. This would release additional capacity from the traditional contact channels in order to better support those who continue to use them.”
“I would recommend Verint for Citizen Engagement to any local authority looking to innovate fast and drive agile customer service,” Hoare concludes. “It simplifies and automates complex business processes to support unpredictable demand from our residents.”
Solution
Four years ago, the Council introduced the ‘Codsall Community Hub’, a collaborative, social space hosting both Council and non-council services, including a business hub of approximately 20 SMEs, GP surgery, children’s nursery, café, and library. Last year, the Hub managed 10,000+ face-to-face interactions.
The Council’s ‘digital by choice’ model takes this customer-centricity into a new dimension, prioritising high quality, user-friendly customer journeys that residents can adopt at their convenience, and via the channel of their choice. Now, South Staffordshire Council is focused on refining service delivery using digital tools, technology, and data insights, laying the foundations for simple and effective customer journeys.
The subsequent Customer Experience Improvement Program, underpinned by Verint for Citizen Engagement, comprises four projects, including process mapping for refined digital journeys, the creation of 40+ online forms with integration, and an innovative ‘My Login’ system giving residents an accessible front door for online forms, all hosted from the council’s website. Since launching the forms, for example, 5,199 waste tickets have benefited from two-way integration between the waste team and the Council’s waste collection supplier’s system.
The Council is also leveraging What3Words, which is a system that allocates a three-word combination for every 3m square area to help identify a location without postcodes and addresses. More than 25% of users are now using the What3Words reference in their tickets raised with the Council’s Street Scene team.
Verint is ensuring South Staffordshire Council receive optimum benefit from their strategy and solutions. A recent root-and-branch Verint Health Check on the deployment made 35 recommendations, of which 24 were actioned. “This onsite/remote ‘pause, check, and recalibrate’ Health Check highlighted opportunities for best practice process improvement and surfaced new service delivery innovations,” says Hoare.
Two stand-out recent innovations included:
- My South Staffs’ mobile app: Enables customers to transact securely online with the Council (e.g., reporting garden waste, noise pollution, fly tipping, etc.) via an app without staff intervention. Among many features, customers can specify a location using the Council’s mapping system, track the progress of service requests, add attachments to service requests, and receive automated confirmation of service requests created and closed via email.
- Verint Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA): Conversational AI will help South Staffordshire Council drive further channel shift and increase the types of citizens who engage digitally, including those who would otherwise be considered digitally excluded. The Council is deploying Verint IVA on their website, with other channels like WhatsApp to follow, to automate customer interactions. This allows the Council to respond to customer inquiries without staff intervention, thereby deflecting contacts.
“Make no mistake, the Council’s innovative ‘Digital by Choice’ business transformation strategy – underpinned by Verint for Citizen Engagement – is delivering on its promise of agile, rewarding, and efficient public services. It’s also enabling our residents to engage with the council outside of our traditional contact centre operating hours.”
Benefits
The outcomes include:
- South Staffordshire Council’s Digital by Choice strategy has resulted in a Verint Channel Shift KPI of 84% for its top ten service requests. This is the result of a 32% drop in the volume of telephone calls between 2021/22 to 2024/25, along with a 40% drop in the number of emails received during the same period. This makes the Council one of Verint’s highest performing clients, which – as of January 2026 – include City of Edinburgh Council (92%), Enfield Council (86%) and the City and County of San Francisco (82%).
- After the integration with What3Words, around 25% of users each month are inputting a W3W reference, which is far exceeding expectations. Usage also continues to rise steadily, from 1,522 W3W references to 2,282 in three months (an increase of 49.9%). The integration between Verint and What3Words has resulted in the Council’s Street Scene team seeing a 30% improvement in the speed to respond to cases. This is due to the fact they no longer have to drive up and down roads looking for the issue themselves.
- South Staffordshire Council’s Digital by Choice strategy has benefitted those residents who prefer to contact the council by telephone, with a 98% drop in residents waiting over 20 minutes for a call to be answered, reducing from 1383 to just 29 in the last 12 months.
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