CASE STUDY: SHEFFIELD CITY COUNCIL
Overview
Sheffield is home to over 575,000 residents, with its City Council ranking as one of the largest in the UK. In 2021, Sheffield City Council (SCC) set out certain post-pandemic focus areas, the core theme of which is improving community relations to create a stronger link between the Council and the people of Sheffield. To align with this, Sheffield needed a citizen experience solution which could facilitate the breadth and depth of services the Council provides, whilst enabling a great service which would improve relationships with communities, city-wide.
The Challenge
SCC’s legacy solution of the previous 10+ years was complicated and inefficient, with little flexibility to keep up with evolving demands and diverse queries. SCC had a vision to offer omni-channel interactions, but at the time had a voice-only service. Alongside this, they needed a scalable solution which would enable the Council to cope with spikes in customer contact. SCC also wanted to improve its historical and real-time reporting capabilities to enable more granular details accessible in one place.
The Approach & Solution
SCC worked with Content Guru to implement the storm platform at pace for its customer service employees. storm enabled the Council to create a centralized contact centre in the cloud, empowering it to take transform its customer engagement, in line with its Community and Public Services development plan.
When the Covid-19 crisis hit, the number of storm users at the Council doubled as the wider team moved onto the platform, enabling employees to provide a more consistent customer experience across the organization and prevent any significant loss of service while working remotely.
• storm FLOWTM gives the Council the ability to make rapid and independent changes to their service, with autonomously configured bespoke customer journeys.
• storm’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities have enabled SCC to create tailored experiences, and over 60% 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 SCC now have the option of using an automated service to log a repair using DTMF (Dual tone multi-frequency) and NLP.
• Lastly, storm VIEWTM provides the Council with on-demand access to detailed reporting and monitoring functionality, with increased ease of use and granularity compared to the previous legacy system.
