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The West Sussex Accessible Services Partnership (WSASP), which uses the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) to underpin its innovative Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, recently won the 2006 Team Award for e-Government excellence.
The CRM system enables service access across West Sussex regardless of the caller's location with 95% of enquiries addressed at the first point of contact.
The West Sussex Accessible Services Partnership, a unique combination of seven boroughs and district councils, the county council, Sussex Police and the NHS, has worked collectively to overcome political, cultural and technical challenges to deliver a seamless customer information system to the 750,000 citizens of West Sussex. The CRM system links a single telephone call centre and 19 regional âHelp Points' which deal with daily queries from the public; anything from a bin not being collected, to a broken street light or an abandoned car.
Since most queries are location based, i.e. relate to where things are, the WSASP CRM uses the locally compiled council land and property gazetteers as the single source of unambiguous location information. Anyone in the call centre or in one of the Help Points can take a street name or a postcode and carry out a search to link a query to a particular location using the built in gazetteer. The system is then able to provide a definitive reference point for further action, for example, automatically generating an e-mail which is sent directly to a sub-contracted refuse collection company in the case of a missed bin collection.
"The local land and property gazetteers (LLPGs) are fed into the WSASP CRM as and when the partnership's borough and district councils complete their updates to the NLPG hub," said Stephen Gray, WSASP Partnership Programme Manager. "This provides the CRM with a single, regularly updated and unambiguous source of address data and provides the geospatial key for much of what the partnership is planning to do in the future. Since every query we get is geo-referenced there is a rich source of information, which we can mine. Councillors for example will soon be able to access information pertinent to their wards and identify trends or particular problems, whilst the partnership itself can use the information to work out staff loadings both in the call centre and the Help Points," continued Gray.
"This is a brilliant example of how LLPGs are impacting the local service delivery environment," said Michael Nicholson, Managing Director of Intelligent Addressing. "Using the West Sussex LLPGs to underpin the WSASP CRM provides a firm foundation for further collaboration both across the county and beyond. By sharing resources the WSASP CRM is able to serve 8 different authorities, 19 face-to-face offices and a telephone call centre with clear benefit in terms of capital investment. Where collaboration can be achieved over wider geographies, the efficiencies and savings that can be made are substantial. The West Sussex Accessible Services Partnership is already seeing the benefits and its CRM is helping them deliver a consistently high level of service," continued Nicholson.
1 February 2007
The West Sussex Accessible Services Partnership, a unique combination of seven boroughs and district councils, the county council, Sussex Police and the NHS, has worked collectively to overcome political, cultural and technical challenges to deliver a seamless customer information system to the 750,000 citizens of West Sussex. The CRM system links a single telephone call centre and 19 regional âHelp Points' which deal with daily queries from the public; anything from a bin not being collected, to a broken street light or an abandoned car.
Since most queries are location based, i.e. relate to where things are, the WSASP CRM uses the locally compiled council land and property gazetteers as the single source of unambiguous location information. Anyone in the call centre or in one of the Help Points can take a street name or a postcode and carry out a search to link a query to a particular location using the built in gazetteer. The system is then able to provide a definitive reference point for further action, for example, automatically generating an e-mail which is sent directly to a sub-contracted refuse collection company in the case of a missed bin collection.
"The local land and property gazetteers (LLPGs) are fed into the WSASP CRM as and when the partnership's borough and district councils complete their updates to the NLPG hub," said Stephen Gray, WSASP Partnership Programme Manager. "This provides the CRM with a single, regularly updated and unambiguous source of address data and provides the geospatial key for much of what the partnership is planning to do in the future. Since every query we get is geo-referenced there is a rich source of information, which we can mine. Councillors for example will soon be able to access information pertinent to their wards and identify trends or particular problems, whilst the partnership itself can use the information to work out staff loadings both in the call centre and the Help Points," continued Gray.
"This is a brilliant example of how LLPGs are impacting the local service delivery environment," said Michael Nicholson, Managing Director of Intelligent Addressing. "Using the West Sussex LLPGs to underpin the WSASP CRM provides a firm foundation for further collaboration both across the county and beyond. By sharing resources the WSASP CRM is able to serve 8 different authorities, 19 face-to-face offices and a telephone call centre with clear benefit in terms of capital investment. Where collaboration can be achieved over wider geographies, the efficiencies and savings that can be made are substantial. The West Sussex Accessible Services Partnership is already seeing the benefits and its CRM is helping them deliver a consistently high level of service," continued Nicholson.
1 February 2007
