East Dunbartonshire Council selects Lagan CRM solution

East Dunbartonshire Council has chosen Lagan’s Frontline CRM solution to improve provision of information at first point of contact in its new, purpose-built centre that will serve 110,000 residents.

Lagan is helping the council to support the delivery of efficiency savings in line with the Scottish Executive ‘Efficient Government’ targets. East Dunbartonshire Council chose Frontline because it allows staff to introduce new services quickly and easily to the contact centre and help deliver savings.

Council Leader John Morrison explained: “Previously only the Housing Repairs Service had a customer-facing telephone call centre. This is what we wanted to change – we wanted all our services to become more customer-friendly. Introducing a multi-service contact centre was a very new concept for us, but it was becoming increasingly important as we moved towards a more efficient delivery of council services. We wanted our citizens to have easier access to our various services, which in turn would help us to improve our relationship with the public.”

The council selected Lagan’s Frontline solution to provide a front-end CRM system to improve efficiency in the contact centre, and to ensure that customers could obtain accurate and consistent answers quickly when they contacted the council. The system was implemented in only five weeks including the training of council staff. In addition to housing repairs, the centre now covers several different services including human resources, service payments, general enquiries and, more recently, waste disposal. Citizens now receive a better service from the council. For example, online job application forms are now handled by Frontline. The council’s e-payment system has also been integrated and can take online payments for services, such as council tax and housing rent, helping to reduce costs.

As in England, Scottish councils have been encouraged by the Scottish Executive to move processes from the back to the front office as part of the ’Efficient Government’ initiative, similar to the Gershon initiative in England.

The initiative aims to deliver public sector savings of £500 million by 2007-8.

(SP/MB)