Wigan Council were able to deliver the Highways Customer Engagement Project in house using Jadu's low-code digital platform, saving up to £100k per year based on 15,000 enquiries.
The system, powered by the Jadu Digital Platform, is a part of the council's Corporate Strategy – ‘The Deal 2030 and Digital Strategy (2021-25’), which aims to enable digital access to all of their services and embrace digital for their people, place, and future.
The council has now been shortlisted for 2022 Annual Innovation Awards, which casts a light on projects and teams that have delivered transformation and excellence in public service delivery.
The council's Highway Services were selected as a priority for migration into the new system, as they receive one of the highest levels of contact from residents, typically over 15,000 enquiries each year. The Highway Services Business Support team were fully engaged in the process and used lessons learnt from previous customer annual survey feedback to re-design a new process that would provide a true 'end-to-end' digital journey.
Another key reason for selecting this service was the fact that the council's Highways Technical and Operational staff all work with hand-held tablets. These tablets already allow them to record highway inspections and generate and complete work tickets directly from site, however, never allowed them to update customer enquiries from site, due to the limitations in the previous customer enquiries systems. Using the new Jadu low-code platform, Jadu’s API functionality and additional system intelligence, this gap could be closed.
The new process allows residents to be kept updated at key decision-making stages of dealing with an enquiry.
“The officers don’t need to create an update to the residents. They just need to make the decision on how the issue needs to be dealt with, so it follows the correct workflow in the legacy highways asset management system. When the status changes in the back office system, it will push a new status change to Jadu that automatically updates the resident and keeps them updated on the progress until the work is completed on site - the process is end-to-end digital”.
– Amanda Litherland, Business Partner for Digital Services at Wigan Council.
The council has also reviewed the process to the way they use and store customer's personal data regarding GDPR Regulations. The new process keeps personal data in the front-end system only, meaning that no resident data is now being stored in their back-office systems or shared throughout the back-office process. This significantly reduces the opportunity for data-breaches and the cost of storing duplicate data in multiple systems.
“We’re incredibly proud of our digital team for really moving at pace with delivery of digital services that are focused on the needs of our customers.” says Alison MckenzieFolan, Chief Executive of Wigan Council. “The Jadu digital platform empowers the council and our teams to create services and deliver them quickly. This award nomination recognises one of the many achievements the team are now making.”
The new fully integrated process, delivered entirely in-house by the Wigan digital team, allows for better analysis on monitoring customer contact performance. It reduces duplication of handling the same enquiry, dealing with customer contact and back-office chase ups, and improves the council's ability to better inform customers on dealing with their enquiry.
“This digital innovation is expected to save significant officer time, cost and complaints in managing duplicate enquiries, while keeping residents updated and informed.”, says Alison Mckenzie Folan.
