In the spotlight: Sheffield City Council

Sheffield is home to more than 575,000 residents, with its City Council ranking as one of the largest in the UK. In 2021, Sheffield City Council set out four key areas it would like to grow and develop in the post-pandemic era:

• Community and Neighbourhood Focus: ensure that all communities have great facilities and live in a flourishing city.
• Education, Health and Care: invest in education to counter inequalities and ensure healthcare providers offer a leading service.
• Climate Change, Economy and Development: create opportunity and a dynamic environment for enterprises, as well as achieving net carbon neutral by 2030.
• Our Council: put the people and communities of Sheffield at the forefront of everything the Council does, working hard to ever improve these relationships.

The core theme of all these areas is a focus on improving community relations to create a stronger link between the Council and the people of Sheffield. To align with this, Sheffield needed a contact centre solution which could facilitate the breadth and depth of services the Council provides, while improving relationships with communities, city wide.

Challenge

However, Sheffield City Council’s previous legacy solution was complicated and inefficient, with little flexibility to keep up with evolving demands and diverse queries. Having used this for 10+ years, the Council wanted move to a cloud-based contact centre model to transform their communications, as part of their initiative to improve community relations. Sheffield City Council offered a voice-only service, but had omni-channel ambitions, with a vision to provide customers with the option to communicate through their preferred channel.

The Council needed a solution that could combine voice, web chat and email channels through a single, easy-to-use system. Alongside this, they needed a scalable solution which would enable it to cope with high spikes in customer contact, for example during a disaster event. The Council wanted to improve its historical and real-time reporting capabilities to enable more granular details accessible in one place.

Solution

Sheffield City Council worked with Content Guru to implement the storm platform at pace for its customer service employees. storm enabled the Council to create a centralised contact centre in the cloud, empowering it to transform its customer engagement, in line with its Community and Public Services development plan.

Outcome

When the Covid-19 crisis hit, the number of storm users at the Council doubled as the wider team moved onto the platform. This enabled employees to work remotely and prevent any significant loss of service during a time of crisis. Since then, many of the Council’s different ‘hubs’ have remained storm, enabling them to provide a more consistent customer experience across the organisation.

storm FLOW, Content Guru’s drag-and-drop service creation tool, Sheffield County Council has autonomously configured bespoke customer journeys on their own IVR script. Text-to-speech technology simplifies the process and provides a consistent voice across the Council’s IVR.

The solution’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities have enabled the Council to create tailored experiences for different customer groups. One example is on the Neighbourhood Officer line, where customers who speak their postcode are automatically routed through to an agent who has access to area-specific information to support them.

More than 60 percent of calls that use NLP now have an automated response, ensuring agents are available to focus on vulnerable customers and urgent inquiries.

Alongside this, customers contacting Sheffield City Council now have the option of using an automated service to log a repair. Customers are able to select from a list of available appointment dates pulled directly from the Council’s total mobile system.

This has increased first contact resolution, as many customers are able to get their queries solved through an automated service, and those who aren’t are routed to the most relevant destination for their query.

Finally, the Council now has on-demand access to detailed reporting and monitoring functionality, with increased ease-of-use and granularity compared to the previous legacy system.