Success Story | Wrexham Council

How Wrexham Council improved citizen experience through integrated communications & service delivery

A brick bridge and waterway in Wrexham UK

48%

Reduction in Customer Calls

12k

Residents Receive Bin Reminders

18k

Self-Service Accounts

93%

Satisfaction Rate

Overview

Wrexham is a County Borough Council situated in Wales, U.K. (population 128,000). The council has been working to deliver a better citizen experience for one of its most-popular services: waste and recycling bin collection. After modernising its approach — by integrating its sophisticated communications platform with digital service delivery — more citizens are opting in to keep the county clean. Today, residents get exceptional customer service, while county staff gets fewer phone calls from confused residents.

SITUATION:

Delivering proper messages at proper moments

The County Borough Council knew the first step to improve the citizen experience was to modernise the way they communicated bin removal services. To ensure citizens received relevant, timely, and automated communications, Wrexham implemented Granicus’s govDelivery email, mobile message, and social media platform. Now, they have the sophisticated marketing automation and audience segmentation required to deliver personalised waste and recycling bin collection reminders to over 12,000 residents. Targeted email messages from the County empower residents to take the correct action at the right moment.

These reminders — delivered alongside educational messages about what can and can’t be recycled — are positively impacting local recycling rates. For example, more customers know what can and can’t be recycled; the number of bins not being collected due to contamination has decreased by 27% since implementing govDelivery.

"We love govDelivery because it gives us control over information. We can find the answers to our questions, and then form good processes to better interact with the people in our Council."

Huw Ap Dewi

Digital Projects Office, Wrexham

SOLUTION

Connecting the dots for better service delivery

Even with targeted and timely communications, Wrexham was still having difficulty reminding citizens of bin services. Why? Their communications were disconnected from back-office systems. They were also unable to give residents the email experience that they had signed up for. Finally, Wrexham couldn’t mandate important fields, resulting in missed information from citizens.

To overcome these challenges and digitise citizen services, Wrexham selected Granicus, the most-trusted supplier of customer service solutions to U.K. local authorities.

"We wanted to replace our CRM and forms solution. Granicus was a leader who delivered what we wanted at a competitive price. The product and company are very easy to work with and we can create things ourselves. The reality is it’s very easy to use. The best part of govService is the flexibility; there are so many different things we were able to do with it. It used to take weeks to make a small change, but with govService we have complete control and can make changes very quickly.”

Huw Ap Dewi

By using govService online forms service, Wrexham captures all critical contact information from every customer checking their bin collection date.

RESULTS

How the govService + govDelivery integration streamlines service

With govService, the County’s digital customer services solution, integrated with govDelivery, their communication platform, the customer experience is seamless.

How does it work? When a customer visits the Wrexham website and enters their address in a form, govService automatically looks up the customer’s collection day and calendar, then sends the information into govDelivery, which automatically signs the customer up for their bin reminder emails. After that, the customer receives relevant, timely, and automated information about their bin collections. This combination has improved sign-up rates and ensured Wrexham reaches more citizens.

"With our previous vendor, we had only 10,000 accounts. But with Granicus, this increased to 18,000 [as of May 2019]. We are seeing a dramatic increase in self-service accounts and subscribers — over 500 a month. This makes it much easier for citizens to transact."

Huw Ap Dewi