OVERVIEW
A web of interaction and connection, a community is shaped and formed from many things. But for Hull City Council, that all-important sense of community is inextricably linked to the quality of the resident experience it offers. Hull deployed Granicus Experience Cloud (GXC) to not only improve its operations but utilise this comprehensive platform to uplift and enhance the service experience of each and every one of its residents, all while enriching the community it serves.
SITUATION
Hull City Council had been a user of Granicus’ digital communications solutions for well over a decade. But as Matt Luty, the organisation’s customer journey programme manager explains, at this juncture, the council was beginning to consider how it could improve both its internal operations and the quality of service it offered its residents. As we’ll see, GXC — particularly the platform’s service request management and sentiment and feedback capabilities — offered the council an efficient and elegant means of solving both challenges.
Hull had a clear vision to deliver a cross organisational customer journey for its residents, visitors, and businesses built upon upskilling existing staff to deliver a comprehensive customer experience internally. To achieve this, the council recognised that a low skills solution that could easily be used by members of staff without specialised technical expertise or knowledge was essential. The council had previous experience with a Granicus product, Firmstep, and the fact that some members of Hull’s staff were already familiar with the product eased the way forward.
“Our initial focus was upon a replacement CRM system and customer engagement platform,” Matt said. “However, integrating a single core consultation platform for our residents and businesses within the same product suite was seen as an enabler toward delivering the vision.”
SOLUTION
As a council, Hull receives a high volume of calls and enquiries and, consequently, sought to implement an element of digital self-service within its operations. The idea, Matt said, is to more efficiently allocate staff resources by empowering residents to help themselves.
“Granicus understands our need to bring those customer engagement platforms together to provide a much more aligned — a much more singular — experience for customers,” he said.
Hull aims to be an organisation that listens to its residents and its customers, to engage with them to understand their needs, their requirements, and their concerns. While Granicus’ entire suite of products supports this aim, for Matt, “GXC helps us understand the impact of the information that we provide to our customers so that we can continue to refine the customer journey.”
As a component within GXC, Hull uses the service request management capabilities of the platform to great effect. Or, as Matt put it, this piece of technology, “Allows our team to develop processes internally that are attuned to customer need and to iteratively improve the customer experience, so that customers are more confident to engage digitally themselves.”
For Hull, this element of self-support — as enabled via the digital services platform — offers a dual benefit in that it empowers customers to help themselves without assistance from council staff. Even better, the feedback functionality embedded within the tool means that Hull can make improvements to its processes on the back of responses received from its customers.
While this level of feedback is important, Matt also added that the information the council gleans from yet another element of the GXC platform — the sentiment and feedback capabilities — is vital in helping it to truly listen to its residents and act on their concerns. These tools are especially valuable for helping residents give their thoughts on large-scale initiatives and projects. This means that the council “can focus our resources on what matters most to them,” he said.
RESULTS
For Hull City Council, the implementation of GXC has offered tangible results, with each element of the platform bringing a different benefit to both the council and its residents.
The use of the digital communications capabilities has enabled the council to apply a structure of strong governance within its operations, allowing it to efficiently pare down the range of topical newsletters within its arsenal of communications.
“We’re in a really good position,” Matt said. “Our internal processes are a lot cleaner, a lot more efficient. We have a much more reduced focus in terms of topics for customers, and we’ve got a much better internal resource to be able to really drive engagement.”
This sense of efficiency, he goes on to say, is echoed in Hull’s use of the sentiment and feedback tool, a capability that — when deployed as part of the GXC platform — has afforded the council a sense of autonomy by allowing it to undertake much of the technical development work in-house.
“It’s crucial for us,” Matt said. “We can create things quickly and we can get new processes in place. We can update them; we can make them much more streamlined very quickly.”
From his perspective, this offers the opportunity to simplify operations and reduce workload for individual case offers, all while saving money and offering a better experience for the council’s customers. Customers have seen the benefit of this implementation via the receipt of automated case updates as individual queries move through the different phases of the resolution process. But likewise, should a member of the public make contact via phone, council staff can now use the platform’s case management function to add value and insight to the inbound call.
But best of all, the service request management element of GXC is helping Hull toward its overarching goal of enabling residents and customers to self-support their queries. Having used the platform’s capabilities for just shy of two years, Matt confirmed there are now approximately 100,000 self-service accounts registered with Hull City Council, with self-service interactions accounting for around 40% of customer interaction with the organisation. That figure stood at 25% prior to the wider GXC implementation. Additionally, out of that wider pool of 100,000 users, Hull counts 10,000 active customer account users per month. Meanwhile, the network of newsletter subscribers has grown to just shy of 130,000, with a range of topics covered under 10 core subjects.
The implementation of GXC is helping to further the council’s aim of offering a customer-first digital approach, one that ultimately leads users to a space where they can help themselves, all while reserving offline, face-to-face contact for those who are not able to access digital resources.
GXC has been vital in this conservational approach to council resources, Matt said.
Going forward, Hull’s wider goal is to continue to grow its network of self-service customers to enable the efficient deployment of its offline resources. Hull is using the platform across all its departments and is actively seeking to expand use by service areas onto the suite. GXC, Matt said, breaks down silos, but — most importantly — it does so while offering support and a meaningful improvement to the quality of life for Hull’s customers and community.
