Sheffield Council Drives Savings and Improved CX with Verint for Citizen Engagement

Solution

Verint for Citizen Engagement in the cloud simplifies and automates the execution of Council processes driving savings, and improved citizen experiences. The many innovations include:

• Development of an internal knowledge base based on an online form. This helps teams find information through sophisticated search and tagging.
• Advisors can now open more than one case at a time, reducing AHT.
• Completed complex payment integration in the Blue Badge solution. The application takes payment and orders the badge (a parking permit for people with disabilities) without any back-office checks, saving around 15 minutes across 10,000 applications per year (equivalent to 2,500 hours per year).
• Natural language processing (NLP) shifted 11,000+ calls a year from the call center using automated services, increasing CX and freeing agents to focus on complex cases.
• The council has recently rebuilt 160 forms using Verint. This improved all online journeys and helped reduce call center volumes. For example, an online rent balance checker reduced this inquiry from being the highest call center inquiry type to outside the top 10.
• The council is building an online direct debit form for adult social care that integrates directly into the back-office payment solution, eliminating paper forms.

Benefits

Sheffield Council’s cloud-first strategy is simultaneously driving improved citizen service, increased efficiency, and reduced cost. Key benefits include:

• Extended agent capacity through automation: NLP moved 11,000+ calls a year from the Council call center, freeing agents to focus on complex cases. For example, when customers want to speak to their housing officer, they verbalize their postcode within the IVR and are routed directly to the housing officer, not the contact center. Customers can also log housing repairs using NLP and Dual-tone Multi Frequency (DTMF).
• Reduced call center AHT by one minute in 12 months via process improvements and back-office integrations.
• Increased first call resolution (FCR) by 5% by reviewing customer service knowledge base within Verint.
• Improved call routing by reviewing inquiry type data from Verint.
• Increased staff and customer satisfaction each quarter of the past year.
• Substantial savings annually as a result of moving to the cloud and reducing contractual costs.
• Increased user/staff adoption rates to ~95% in six months via interaction logs against calls.

Staff feedback so far has been highly positive. Among many feedback comments, people have said, “searching for customers is much clearer”, “the ability to update and create customers quickly is very impressive”, and “the improvements are going to save us so much time”.

Gunnell adds, “This represents a step-change in the Council’s service delivery. We have transformed the citizen experience, the user experience, and the speed with which we can report. We can integrate new services more easily and create more accessible services. It’s a system which Sheffield can be proud of.”