Wokingham Borough Council – Success Story
Wokingham Borough Council – Success Story
Wokingham Borough Council chooses self-service web solution from Knowledge Powered Solutions to support its Customer First programme. Citizens can quickly and easily find answers to their questions on the Council’s website using the site’s updated information access solution.
As part of Wokingham Borough Council’s overarching Customer First programme, they identified a need to update the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) content on their website.
After careful consideration the Council selected Universal Knowledge from Knowledge Powered Solutions (KPS) - a Knowledge Management tool featuring intelligent search, expert escalation and content and document management features.
The enhanced solution from KPS has enabled citizens to quickly and easily find answers their questions via Universal’s excellent self-service feature on the Wokingham Borough Council website. This has resulted in the number of inbound calls to the council’s call centre being greatly reduced thereby allowing call centre staff to focus their time on helping citizens with more complex queries.
In the summer of 2009, Wokingham Borough Council’s front line customer management team, Wokingham Direct, identified a need to update the basic Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) search engine and content on the Council’s website.
As part of the Council’s overarching Customer First programme of implementing a corporate-wide Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, the team wanted to provide citizens with quick and accurate answers to their questions. Their aim is to ensure that 80% of their customers are either very satisfied or satisfied with the service they receive and, by having up-to-date, searchable content delivered through the Council’s website the team felt that this would be a big step forward in ensuring that this objective is consistently met.
They invited three vendors to bid, and after careful consideration, selected Universal Knowledge from Knowledge Powered Solutions (KPS). It was felt that KPS offered not only the best fit solution in terms of functionality, but it also offered the best fit on cost by suggesting a bundled price which included licences and services, as well as annual support and maintenance.
The system went live on the Council’s website in November 2009 and, using Universal’s sophisticated search engine, citizens can search a number of knowledge repositories throughout the website to find answers to their questions.
Wokingham Borough Council is one of the first councils in the UK to implement intelligent search selection on their website.
Nicholas Spencer, Website Manager at Wokingham Borough Council said: “The solution proposed by Knowledge Powered Solutions was of immediate interest to us as we knew that their FAQ management tool was being used by other public sector organisations. Citizens can quickly and easily find answers to their questions on our website using the self service feature and this has greatly reduced the number of “avoidable contact” calls. We are delighted with these results and our call centre staff are now able to focus on dealing with more complex queries.”
Mark Rae, Sales Manager at KPS stated: “In accordance with NI14 (avoidable contact), one of the 198 indicators against which local government will be assessed within the new performance management framework, Wokingham Borough Council are one of the first councils to implement intelligent search selection on their website to comply with this. We are extremely proud that they selected KPS to provide them with their self-service web solution and following on from this we are assisting the Council in rolling out Universal Knowledge across their call centre.”
