Council boosts its customer service

Braintree District Council in Essex is installing customer service technology to improve the services provided to its 150,000 citizens.

The council will also use the Siebel 50 customer service system to help fulfil local authority service excellence targets laid down by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Roger Bramwell, Braintree’s head of customer services, says the technology will make it easier for the public to talk to the council and receive a first-time resolution for their problems.

‘In the past, customers would phone the local council and, apart from not knowing what department to go through to, there was no guarantee that they would eventually get there if they were transferred from a switchboard,’ he said.

‘We can now capture customer requests and keep a history of what they called us about the first time around, so the caller doesn’t have to explain everything that has happened before.’

Braintree is the first UK local authority to take on the Siebel 50 system, which Siebel unveiled last week with the promise that smaller local government buyers will be able to implement it within 50 days.

Ed Thompson, a Gartner customer relationship management software analyst, says Siebel is looking to use the new technology to turn around a poor record of selling its software at local government level.

‘The reason it has come up with Siebel 50 is that it had about seven live customers in the UK on its old local government package. That is not very many when you consider that the big boys such as Lagan, Northgate and Oracle all have about 30-plus local government customers live on similar systems,’ he said.

‘The plus points of the Siebel package are a good price point, and a reference-able customer in Braintree; the downside is that it is unclear just what level of integration the package can give,’ he said.

‘The less in-built integration it has, the more expense this system will cause later on in its lifecycle.'