Southampton City Council

Southampton City Council

Southampton City Council’s 14 Children’s Centres help ensure children get the best start in life. Since 2007, CACI’s Children’s Centre Manager (CCM) has been used across all centres to record family registration details and the services they use.

The challenge

Southampton City Council Children’s Centres data team benefit from having access to data from other agencies. Being able to integrate this data was critical but the amount of work involved in managing this process, on ever tighter budgets, was proving difficult for the council.

The solution

Southampton City Council Children’s Centres data team benefit from having access to data from other agencies. Being able to integrate this data was critical but the amount of work involved in managing this process, on ever tighter budgets, was proving difficult for the council. CACI introduced the Hub – a sophisticated data quality and data matching application – which integrates and automatically updates data records between the council and other agencies. After the automated process is complete the user receives a report outlining import results.

The results

Southampton City Council are now able to complete their data integration process within a significantly reduced time period, and have also seen an increase in their data quality.

“Over the course of a year it used to take us in the region of 60 days of effort -this can now be completed in closer to 10 days. This saves us 10 weeks a year!
On top of that we have seen an improvement in data quality. The Hub revealed to us existing quality and duplicate issues that we were unaware of, and we can easily spot any occasional duplicates that may be entered into the CCM database.”
Andy Hart, Management Information Officer, Southampton City Council

Newham Council

Newham Council

The challenge

Newham Council serves a population of 310,000 and has one of the largest cohorts of pupils in London. It processes in excess of 5,000 reception applications and around 4,000, Year 7 applications every autumn. In addition, it must allocate school places in response to 7,000-8,000 in-year applications per annum.

The council had an existing geographic information system (GIS) that was used to calculate home to school distances to help allocate school places according to strict over-subscription criteria, including which catchment area and parish children live in. This system was very cumbersome and did little to speed up what was a time consuming, complex and stressful task for the council’s school admissions team.

Checking the distance measurements was a rigorous task and an inefficient use of team leader’s time. Newham Council wanted to focus on the family and avoid mistakes so every child received the correct school offer. If, for example, home-to-school distances were inaccurately calculated, it could lead to an increase in appeals, substantial administrative and legal costs, damaging negative publicity and a loss of trust in the community.

While council staff found the demands of the admissions process complex, so too did parents, carers and guardians. Many families found it hard to understand how places were allocated, and high volumes of calls were made to the council’s call centre every year requesting information on home-to-school distances and the precise catchment boundaries. These telephone enquiries were costly for the council, weren’t always helpful for parents, carers and guardians, and the information between the front and the back end systems did not always match.

The solution

Newham Council implemented a two-fold approach, in partnership with CACI they developed a new distance measuring system which rapidly calculates accurate catchment and distance information for each pupil and their school preference. It also integrates with the council’s Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) to give accurate, up-to-date address information.

CACI and Newham Council also worked alongside Esri UK to implement a geographic information system (GIS), named School Locator app, which integrates with CACI’s admissions system. The app acts as a public-facing web portal, where parents, carers and guardians can see catchment areas, Catholic parishes, closest schools, interactive maps and the all-important home-to-school distances tie-breakers (both shortest walking and straight line), most of which would previously have been impossible for the public to determine without contacting the council by telephone.

The results

The implementation of CACI’s more accurate admissions system and integrated School Locator app, enables the council’s school admissions team to work more productively, processing applications more quickly and efficiently. Significantly, this solution has given Newham Council true confidence in the rigour of its school admissions process and reduced risk. Newham Council’s admissions decisions are now based on even more accurate location information and the same criteria are applied consistently to all applications.

The greatest benefit, for Tracy Jones, Head of Pupil Services at Newham and her team, is the clarity the solution delivers for residents. Schools and families can now simply visit a web portal to see exactly which catchment area pupils live in, identify their nearest schools and calculate distances. There is now complete transparency between the information the council and the parents sees, resulting in complete openness about school admissions decisions.

Newham Council typically handles more than 1,500 school admission appeals a year, at a cost of around £50 each. If the recent implementation of CACI’s admissions system and Esri’s School Locator App were to decrease this figure by just 20 per cent, it would save Newham Council £15,000 a year. By reducing the odds of appeals progressing to judicial review, the new system could potentially save the council many more tens of thousands of pounds.

Hackney Youth Justice service

Hackney Youth Justice service

Hackney Youth Justice Service works with multiple agencies in the London Borough of Hackney to reduce youth offending and reoffending, and mitigate the impact of crime on families, communities and victims. Information sharing between these agencies is critical to managing the risks and vulnerabilities associated with young people, their families and the community.

The challenge

Hackney Youth Justice Service stores files about young people in its service using a document management system, Open Text eDocs. Adding data to this system was very manual and time consuming, and involved sourcing information from multiple systems. This opened up the risk of error and sharing the wrong information with the wrong people, as well as making data sharing very difficult.

The solution

CACI integrated eDocs with the ChildView youth justice application, ensuring all documents are accessed from a single source. Integration works both ways, so when a file is added to eDocs it is immediately added to the person record in ChildView. The system is used by youth offending workers to access documents from across the council and other agencies including social care and health services.

The results

Since adding an integration layer between eDocs and ChildView, Hackney Youth Justice Service has been able to save considerable time in storing, sharing and acting on information. And because documents are now stored in one place they have also been able to save on IT storage and associated costs.

“The difference that integration between eDocs and ChildView has made to our service cannot be understated. Something as simple as having every single document all in one place saves us time and money, and ensures we are acting on the right information all the time.”
Brendan Finegan, Service Manager, Hackney Youth Justice

Brighton and Hove

Brighton and Hove

The challenge

Prior to 2013, Brighton and Hove’s Children’s Centres did not have a centralised Management Information System. Data was managed in an ad-hoc manner, primarily through the use of Excel spreadsheets. This made the production of accurate reports a very labour and time intensive task.

Like all Children’s Centres teams across the country, Brighton and Hove were facing an ever increasing dependence on the production of quality information, to demonstrate their impact to Ofsted and to help shape service delivery in the future.

Brighton and Hove also recognised the importance of establishing a robust process around the chosen system, ensuring that all Centres were using it in a uniform way, with a Central Administration team managing core data and producing central reports. The implementation of CACI’s Children’s Centre Manager (CCM) system has enabled a uniform set of activities to be designed and defined by their associated KPI targets.

The solution

Brighton and Hove City Council ran a competitive tendering process early in 2013. CACI’s CCM system demonstrated the unique ability to tailor the solution to satisfy their needs. Following the tendering process and contract award, Brighton & Hove worked closely with CACI to ensure that the implementation of the system was a success.

As well as the core functionality around managing families, services and attendances, Case Work and Reporting, Brighton and Hove also purchased two additional modules – Barcoding and Messaging, which allow for time saving around attendance recording through the implementation of barcoded registers and membership cards. To enable the Centres to identify specific groups and send pertinent messages (e.g. details of the next smoking cessation course to ‘Smoking Parents’) the Text Messaging module has also been implemented.

Results and benefits

Brighton and Hove’s Children’s Centres’ integration with Health led to information on new births being directly imported into the CCM on a regular basis. This has resulted in greater data accuracy, substantial time saving on data input and the ability to easily combine data sets across NHS and Council systems. CACI developed a procedure which handles this upload automatically; skilfully and patiently negotiating the data security protocols of two large, public organisations.

The solution has resulted in standardisation of attendance data across the entire service, which has meant a systematic approach to assessing performance, more confident completion of OFSTED Self Evaluation Forms and better transparency and accountability to the Advisory Groups that govern each centre.

“Moving from our existing attendance management system to CACI’s CCM felt like a daunting task at first, but the confidence, experience and clarity of guidance they offered during the planning stages was exceptional, and the resulting migration was faultless. Following the painless implementation project, the ongoing support has been responsive and dedicated. I’m yet to find a problem they can’t solve, and the people are quite nice too.”
Ben Miles, Performance Analyst, Brighton & Hove City Council

Four crucial questions ask about your single customer view

Four crucial questions ask about your single customer view

Discover whether you have a source of insight you can rely on for business decision-making or if you need to address inaccuracies in your data sources with an identity resolution project

An error-free, up-to-date and de-duplicated Single Customer View is the holy grail to deliver exceptional, personalised customer experiences. It’s also vital so you can analyse customer behaviour and campaign performance continually, evolving and adapting them to sustain performance.

Of course, it’s not a simple aspiration for a modern, competitive and fast-growing business. With multiple data sources in a range of systems and repositories, real-time data flowing in and out and an array of customer channels, you have your work cut out.

The rewards of getting the Single Customer View right are compelling – truly personalised marketing, exceptional customer engagement and loyalty that deliver great campaign ROI, revenues and profits. With a deep understanding of what your customers want and need, driven by highly relevant engagement and analysis of customer behaviour and propensities, you’ll have the insight to design and deliver what your customers want ahead of your competitors.

Without an accurate Single Customer View, it’s impossible to achieve that level of sustained performance. Errors in data create a lack of trust, both within the business and with your customers and audiences who are on the receiving end of poorly targeted campaigns. Campaign planning becomes subjective rather than data-led, while customers turn to competitors who can deliver the experiences and information they want in a timely and relevant way.

FOUR CRUCIAL QUESTIONS

You need a positive answer to all four of these questions about your Single Customer View, if you want it to be a reliable and effective source of decision-making insight:

  1. Does it hold unique, real-time customer records?
  2. Is all the data clean, reliable and standardised, with matched addresses?
  3. Does it bring together customer data from every online and offline source in your organisation?
  4. Is it scalable for future needs?

Not many organisations can answer all four questions with a resounding yes. If you have any doubt about the integrity of your Single Customer View, or if you don’t have one that you can rely on, you need to take action quickly.

To make it easier and quicker to fix or establish your Single Customer View, CACI’s specialist data team has developed the ResolvID application. It’s a powerful tool to create a trustworthy source of customer data for reliable analysis. It resolves data from disparate sources – including your CRM, e-commerce and finance systems as well as offline data and mobile apps. You can use the accurate and unified outputs with confidence for analytics and data science, campaign activation, BI and reporting.

If you’d like to find out more about how ResolvID can help you clean up your Single Customer View so you can deliver high performance campaigns and analytics that are trusted by everyone in the business, get in touch with our team.

What can the water sector learn from other sectors to improve customer experience?

What can the water sector learn from other sectors to improve customer experience?

Identity Resolution, customer segmentation, and real-time multi-channel communication tools have the ability to surprise and delight water customers in the UK. What can be learnt from the success of other sectors?

The dreaded “Beast from the East” of February and March 2018 left over 200,000 consumers in England and Wales with little or no water and resulted in OFWAT releasing their “Out in the Cold” report – measures and requirements to prevent something like this from ever happening again.

Then, Covid hit. When whispers of a distant virus first circulated in the UK, I don’t think anyone truly anticipated just how serious it would be. Over a year into it, everyone is still trying to make sense of the changing consumer habits and how household and non-household consumption will change moving forward. Regardless of anyone’s opinions on how the future might look, one thing is clear – demand is high.

If you’re not familiar with the nuances of demand forecasting or operations for the water sector, you may be thinking “well of course demand is high, everyone is at home”. However, the consequences of this are much more far reaching – from consumers completely changing peak usage as a result of later waking times due to mass non-commuting, to children not being at school during an unseasonably hot Spring in 2020, causing paddling pools to be filled across the nation. This caused a big headache for many departments within the water sector – such as diverting water supplies to meet demand for those at the extremes of reservoir distance, adjusting pressure times for household consumption, and massive concerns about the size of pipes being too small to deliver the demand of water at peak times.

One thing was clear, water companies needed to ask consumers to consider how much water they were using. Nothing as extreme as a hose pipe ban was required (yet)…but considering not filling up your paddling pool every day, not having a bath every evening because you’re in lockdown or reconsidering whether the car needs to be washed every. single. day.

CACI is in the fortuitous position where we work across multiple sectors with the sole focus of enabling organisations to “do amazing things with data”. So, what can the water sector learn from other sectors to enhance their communication with their own customers – not only improving engagement, but ensuring consumers are contacted in channels that appeal to them.

If I was the Director of Customer Engagement at a water company, what would I do?

By following the four below points you’ll be enabling your organisation to trust that you’re speaking to the right customer, with messages that resonate with them, via the right channel.

MAKE SURE MY CUSTOMER DATA IS IN ORDER

If I look at myself, I have multiple email addresses, my surname is frequently misspelt (thanks Rob Brydon), I have two mobile phones with different numbers, even my postal address frequently appears incorrect on certain address look-up providers, which means I’m sometimes on edge as to which of the three incorrect addresses my parcel will be sent to (thank god I live in a little village with a local postie)! Data can get messy. With customer data stored in disparate databases, customer engagement/customer services are often the teams that get the brunt of customer frustration.

Typically, you’ll find a customer who’s disgruntled needing to phone a call centre to complain, to then be asked for their non-sensical account number (which often needs to be found on a letter or via an online account – a whole other kettle of fish trying to log in there), to then be directed to a different team, to then be put on hold. It’s a sure way to reduce C-SAT scores and irritate your customers – probably escalating that complaint and making it harder to resolve.

Now, imagine a world where you can link all customer data and ensure that it’s correct. So, if a customer phones into a call centre with a complaint you’re able to quickly and effectively go to one customer record, with all their contact history. That would improve their experience immediately!

The ability to connect online and offline data in real-time already exists. So, this problem could be a distant memory. Read all about it here.

BE PREPARED IN AN EMERGENCY

If the past has shown anything, having the ability to communicate to customers in real-time across channels is vitally important. The great news? There is already tonnes of technology out there to enable you to do this. Imagine the water supply is being cut off in an area due to a burst main. Well how about if you could:

  • Immediately send out a text or email to all residents affected
  • Provide them an update once the issue has been resolved and direct them to an information hub if they need any further details
  • Send them a letter/email 7 days later apologising for the disruption and informing them of customer service information should there be any further problems.

That’s just in an emergency, imagine if you could set up customer journeys for all sorts of other reasons, e.g planned engineering works, hose pipe bans etc – rather than the typical letter consumers receive.

All this technology exists in the market already and is used very successfully for marketing campaigns. The utilities sector is pretty unique in the requirement to contact customers in these situations – why not take advantage of this powerful technology?

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE TOOLS TO COMMUNICATE THROUGH CHANNELS THAT APPEAL TO THEM

Emergency communication is one thing, but consumers are expecting you to provide them with interesting content. We’re already working with lots of water companies to understand financially vulnerable customers and providing the tools to inform them of social eligibility tariffs, for example, but a key area is understanding what channels a consumer is going to respond to, and having the campaign tools in house to deliver this content.

Customer journeys are used widely within sectors such as auto, retail and leisure – there is no reason why the water sector shouldn’t also embrace this to drive engagement (and increase the C-MEX and C-SAT scores).

David Sealey from CACI, interviewed Gareth Ballard from Braze in April last year, and it’s definitely worth a watch if you’re looking to form human connections with your customers.

MAKE SURE I REALLY UNDERSTAND MY CUSTOMERS AND THEIR NEEDS

We talk about this all the time at CACI – segmentation is our bread and butter. I can’t re-iterate enough – understanding your customers is so important. How would you feel if you received a letter asking you to stop watering your garden so much in a lockdown when you’re in the top floor flat in 30 degrees with no access to outside space? Not great.

Trying to encourage behavioural change can be supported further when we add attitudinal information to a rich demographic segmentation. Lessons can be learnt from EDF’s Smart Meter Roll Out programme, where CACI built out attitudes to understand the drivers for people to get a smart meter, and then built an integrated communication journey to encourage change.

How could this work for the water sector? Well, perhaps something like the below:

  • Creative One (Environmental Families): Content around family activities to encourage water saving.
  • Creative Two (Frugal Flat Owners): Content around the money individuals can save around the home by engaging with their water provider, e.g free toilet flushing water savers + a water meter
  • Creative Three (Nosey Neighbours): Use demand metrics to say how much water a neighbourhood is using vs another within the area – or simply provide a number of free water saving equipment delivered within the area to encourage uptake.

Does any of this resonate? I’m very happy to talk you through any of the above as part of an Art of the Possible session and bring in Subject Matter Experts to really drive forward your customer experience. Just get in touch and I can set up a 45-minute session with you today.