Staffordshire County Council

Staffordshire County Council

Staffordshire County Council boosts citizen engagement and satisfaction with Community Central

Staffordshire County Council (SCC) has invested in a software solution to link its highways assets and its communities by implementing the Community Central platform from Brightly software and Jadu.

The council is reporting a smarter, streamlined process; higher levels of customer satisfaction, and greater visibility and accountability for elected members following the investment.

The new system is reducing the duplication of reports of highway issues and has greatly simplified the reporting process, making it easier for citizens to navigate. A ‘members dashboard’ links elected councillors with active and closed reports, boosting accountability. Customer feedback surveys indicate increased customer satisfaction with the system's accessibility and ease of use. Improved efficiencies in the system’s backend, meanwhile, have also been noted by the highways team.

 

Jadu and Brightly implementation teams were responsive, open and collaborative and they developed a really strong working relationship with our team

Tim Heminsley, Head of Projects and Technical Services, Staffordshire County Council

The interactive map shown on a mobile device

How it works

Community Central provides a digital platform for communities to engage with and feed into the management of the vital assets they use every day.

In Staffordshire, this system is now actively helping residents to report potholes, and other highways-relate issues requiring maintenance or repairs. A visual and user-friendly interface enables residents to easily report, track, and monitor highways assets that are managed in the Brightly Confirm Enterprise Asset Management System. This provides residents and stakeholders with visual, real-time information on the community assets and what work is planned, from the initial reporting of an issue, through to the resolution. Critical to the system’s success is the deep integration with the Jadu digital platform. With Jadu, residents can quickly and simply find asset information on a map view and input accurate details about an issue. Highly streamlined and with redundant steps removed, the map view shows real time updates of progress in resolving reported issues.

This progress reporting is possible, because reported cases are automatically raised in both Jadu and Confirm directly from the details of the resident report, removing double entry.

Council staff or work crews can now update the enquiry in Confirm, which will automatically update all relevant information, regarding work and status, on the Jadu platform and automatically notify the citizen who logged the issue (or those who added to it) of the progress in fixing it.

A transformed digital experience for citizens

SCC’s previous in-house reporting system was fairly simple to use, but they are delighted with the streamlining, improved accessibility, and user experience that are already evident just three months after activation.

“We do regular customer satisfaction surveys”

Tim Heminsley, Head of Projects and Technical Services, Staffordshire County Council, explains.

“We’ve immediately seen an uptick since Community Central went live. The highly visual user interface makes
it incredibly intuitive to use, and the seamless integration with Confirm means that report updates automatically feed through to the end user – so residents have a very real appreciation of progress towards resolution of reports that they’ve raised.”


“Everything from indicating the level of urgency of a job, through to describing it, has become simpler, with easy-to-use and easy-to-understand menu options. The implementation process was very smooth. We were not a particularly straightforward client to work with because we had a number of requirements based on functionality in our original system that we needed to replicate. Both the Jadu and Brightly implementation teams were responsive, open and collaborative, and they developed a really strong working relationship with our team that has continued after the go-live date.”