In 2021, Nottingham City Council engaged Govtech to deliver its webCAPTURE Revenues processing automation service. This would transform – customer experience by making it simpler for more customers to use online self-service and improve performance with automated processing. Automation would free up experienced team members to devote more time to complex cases and focus on early intervention to aid recovery of debt. 

Since going live in 2022, Nottingham has seen a rapid growth in online take up:

As the following graph shows, not only was there an increase in online transactions, but those interactions were fully automated and archived in the Document Management System (DMS) as complete; meaning there was no work involved for the team.

In Revenues, completed items (those which were fully automated) freed up the time of 6.5 FTE. Other items, which business rules flagged for Review, also delivered savings because these had also been partially automated and the intervention generated explained exactly what was required by the Officer to complete them.

In monetary terms, reverse analysis has shown that, if Nottingham were to manually process the transactions automated by Govtech, it would take 160,000 hours. Instead, this resource has been reassigned to focus on early interventions and recovery which has a positive impact on the collection rate.

In Benefits, Nottingham has subscribed to UCDS, Govtech’s Universal Credit Digital Service, where automation has helped to release around 6 experienced Benefits FTEs, who now either spend more time dealing with complex cases or were retained within Revenues for the purpose of council tax administration and debt recovery which provides greater added value than removing the positions. The ability to free up and redeploy experienced staff is consistently reported by Govtech customers. 

The rapid growth in online take-up following the removal of registration barriers meant that the email channel declined, and Nottingham felt comfortable that switching off that channel altogether would not simply divert people back to the contact centre.

A key aim of Nottingham was to transform the online experience for citizens alongside a doubling of online engagement in 2 years….

More recently, Nottingham’s statistics from Q3 2024/5 show it is achieving an automation rate of 90% for ‘Change of Address’ which is the most complicated Council Tax transaction to fully automate. A tremendous achievement which places Nottingham joint-third in the Govtech ‘change of address leaderboard’.

Migration and onboarding

Journey to get more from automation

As with every automation journey, working together in partnership, Nottingham evolved and tweaked its parameters to try and tune out items that were categorised as either medium or high. This involved changing their business rules to maximise automation, allowing more transactions to be processed without manual intervention, or at the very least, minimal validation from a colleague. Those that were still flagged would be presented and prioritised in the DMS workflow for colleagues to complete. 

Also with an annual service review, together Govtech and Nottingham look at its automation statistics to see what is working, what could be improved, deliver more, as well as sharing of best practise from other councils and how it might benefit or apply to them.

Online adoption

One of Nottingham’s key objectives was to get more of their citizens and customers to transact online. It was difficult to promote the previous online solution as it didn’t deliver in terms of automation meaning customers were still waiting for their requests to be processed. They needed to channel shift to the new Govtech webforms so they could benefit from the perks of automation. Branded to suit Nottingham’s website, the new forms were put in place and instantly, and quite rapidly, traffic to the forms grew and so the team was able to close emails as a channel to reach them; instead directing them to their new suite of webforms on their website.

Customer satisfaction

Feedback on the new webforms provided outstanding results, with citizens delighted by how ‘easy’ it was to interact online. A survey from a sample of 5,000 respondents scored the new forms a 4.6 / 5 for satisfaction and because of this, they are more likely to continue using online services. Thus, as the tangent continues to grow, and with more people interacting online, the more savings and resources saved within the team.