Gedline Borough Council reduced phone contact, increased efficiency and financial savings.
Gedling Borough Council is home to 114,000 citizens and covers the north and northeast areas of Nottingham, UK. The borough has 50 elected councillors spanning 21 wards.
Learn how better citizen engagement reduced call centre costs by 14%.
SITUATION
Each year Gedling Borough Council collects council tax from every household; a process which has traditionally caused extra work for staff during the billing period and a huge influx of phone calls from citizens who have questions about paying their tax bill. Council leaders needed to find a way of reducing the number of calls to their call centre in order to free up staff time and reduce call centre fees. They had to get more people managing their tax payments via Direct Debit and their account details online.
SOLUTION
n an effort to increase the number of people managing their tax payments and details online, and residents’ awareness of other council services, Gedling used the GovDelivery Communications Cloud (by Granicus) to encourage more people to subscribe to its “Keep Me Posted” email bulletins service. This gave the council an opportunity to engage people in advance of the council tax billing period, ensuring they were well informed and less likely to need support over the phone.
The Council Tax team at Gedling provided the Communications team with email addresses for 10,090 residents and together they identified the campaign’s key messages. They sent an email bulletin to those people, directing them to the online council tax services, along with an incentive encouraging residents to sign up to bulletins from other council services too.
RESULTS
As a direct result of the email campaign, more citizens were able to pay their bill and update personal details online instead of feeling the need to call. This led to 3,500 fewer calls in total to the Council Tax team in comparison to the same period the year before, representing a saving of £8k on phone contact costs.
The email campaign saw a ~70% open rate and prompted 1,000 residents to subscribe to other updates via Keep Me Posted, increasing the council’s reach for other campaigns. The team used the analytics available in the GovDelivery system to cleanse and update its database, removing any invalid email addresses.
