Creating a seamless journey for residents
Liverpool City Council is committed to giving its residents a better quality of life, building on community spirit and strong local partnerships to shape how public services are developed, and delivered.
“Customers live in a digital world where they bank and shop online — and there’s an expectation we’ll deliver our services the same way. With a digital approach, we can also use our resources more effectively, whilst ensuring that those people who require more help and support to interact with us are not left behind,” explains Alison Hughes, Assistant Director for ICT, Digital & Customer at the council.
With this in mind, the local authority set out on a digital transformation journey to better understand its residents, tailor their experiences, and ultimately provide the best possible service to them.
The challenge: Legacy system proves inflexible
The council’s contact center is its ‘voice’, but the legacy system delivering this was ready for replacement. “It was clunky. We’d have to log into different modules for aspects like quality monitoring, while important customer information was siloed,” says Hughes. “We had no upgrade path and the changes we wanted were either costly, or impossible to deploy.”
Problems became more evident during the coronavirus pandemic. The workload soared as the contact center team and their colleagues from public-facing council offices, and drop-in centers needed to manage business grants, support vulnerable people, manage food hubs, and run a host of other critical services.
Staff needed to work from home, but the legacy system required a Virtual Private Network to be installed on each employee’s computers — which proved a huge drain on resources. “This underlined our need for a new platform built for agility,” says Hughes.
The solution: 8x8 Contact Center impresses
The council went out to tender and selected the 8x8 Contact Center after an impressive demonstration of the solution in action at the Government’s Legal Aid Agency headquarters in Newcastle.
With the Liverpool design complete, 8x8 worked around the clock to go from user acceptance testing to launching the solution successfully for 190 employees within 33 days, alongside a robust business continuity plan. “It was a huge challenge but the deployment team were brilliant,” says Laura Jones, ICT Programme Manager, Liverpool City Council.
The results: Everything on a single platform
Now, the council has a single contact center platform for all customer communications, including voice, emails, and social media. Residents can access council services via a single portal.
“With 8x8, we’ve got so much more for our investment — far beyond telephony,” says Jones. “We also have the agility to respond to changing needs a lot faster and upgrade — and also enable hybrid ways of working. Because the solution is cloud based, staff can work easily anywhere, on any device, and 8x8 provides the authentication — and that’s massive for us.”
