Revenues & Benefits teams are under increasing pressure to manage rising workloads, improve customer experience and deliver more with limited resources. Automation is helping councils meet these challenges head-on by removing repetitive manual processes, reducing backlogs and creating more resilient, efficient services.
Citizens benefit from faster responses, 24/7 self-service access and a smoother experience, while your teams are freed up to focus on more complex and higher-value work. Bristol City Council has been using automation for 9-years, Cheshire East Council 8-years and Preston and Lancaster City Councils Shared Revenues Service for 1-year but are already seeing a return on investment. They’ve shared their stories to help you understand the value of digital process automation in Revenues & Benefits.
At Bristol City Council, the Revenues team needed a way to manage significant volumes of incoming work while maintaining service quality for residents.
Kevin Smith, Operations Manager, explains:
“We’re faced with significant volume of incoming work from our citizens and one option to reduce the demand on the service is to create efficiencies through automation.”
By introducing automated, fully integrated online processes, Bristol City Council has enabled residents to access services 24/7 while allowing staff to focus on more complex cases that require greater attention and expertise.
“The staff in the Revenue service can concentrate on those more complex, difficult or challenging pieces of work that need more focus.”
The impact has been significant for both the council and its residents.
“We’ve removed hundreds of thousands of transactions every year.”
It’s simple. Automation has enabled Bristol City Council to create more efficient processes and deliver a more responsive Revenues service that better services its citizens.
At Cheshire East Council, growing correspondence volumes and increasing backlogs were creating delays for residents and pressure on teams.
Maria Hill, Council Tax Manager explains:
“Our backlogs were growing both in volume and the length of time we were responding to customers. So, automation was the natural route to go down.”
By embracing automation, Cheshire East Council was able to reduce delays, improve response times and modernise the customer experience. Also, due to the collaborative nature of the service, the team can adapt parameters quickly when service demands change. And that saved the team “hours and hours of work” as their customers could do it online themselves.
Beth Hooson, Systems, Performance and Improvement Manager, describes how this has improved the experience for residents:
“Automation has given the residents of Cheshire East a much better experience. They can go online and serve themselves. It’s pretty instant. Where processes previously sat in manual backlogs for weeks, residents can now receive bills within days.”
The council also saw immediate growth in automation performance, achieving around 70% from the outset, increasing further over time to now around 86% - 87%.
At Preston City Council and Lancaster City Council, rapid housing growth and rising Council Tax correspondence created increasing pressure on Revenues teams.
With more than 10,000 new properties built in recent years, the Shared Revenues Service recognised they needed a more sustainable way to manage workloads without increasing headcount.
Candice Lancaster, Business Support Manager, explains:
“We needed to do something because we were not going to get any more staff... We needed a better way of dealing with that.”
Automation enabled the councils to respond to growing demand more efficiently while maintaining service delivery for residents.
For both councils, the relationship and partnership approach were equally important to the success of the project. As Candice continued:
“The service has been really supportive. It felt like a real partnership. It felt like we were in it together.”
Because of this, they were able to introduce automation confidently, supported by a team focused on helping them achieve long-term operational improvements.
Last year alone, we automated 45 million digital transactions. 60 councils, using Govtech’s automation, are seeing real, measurable outcomes. Many are achieving automation rates of 80% – 90%, including complex processes such as Change of Address, helping remove hundreds of thousands of manual transactions every year.
This is true end-to-end automation – where transactions are completed automatically, liability is updated correctly and new Council Tax bills are issued without officer intervention. The result is reduced administrative pressure, improved service resilience and more time for your teams to focus on collection, customer support and vulnerable residents.
Your peers are achieving these outcomes through close collaboration and partnership, using automation to support their wider digital transformation ambitions in Revenues & Benefits. And it’s never too late to start your journey and see the immediate results for yourself.
Sharing Stories Leads to SuccessWatch our customer videos and hear about their automation journeys. Discover the challenges they faced, the results they achieved and how automation has helped transform their Revenues & Benefits Service. |
|