The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham council (LBBD), based in East London, serves a
population of approximately 230,000 citizens on a wide range of issues, from social housing to
support for community-based health initiatives.
The Contact Centre provides telephone-based support whilst its Libraries & Walk In Centres
provide face to face support, both channels requiring access to a wealth of information
which must be easily accessible and up to date.
The Universal Knowledge solution from Knowledge Powered Solutions provides a
single unified platform to capture and access information from a variety of sources, including
the LBBD website which is a rich source of information for citizen enquiries. Additional
information is stored directly in the knowledge base, captured using templates for consistency
of style and structure.
Subjects are wide ranging and include council tax support, social housing, repairs, parking, schooling and advice and guidance on money and debt. The contact centre receives circa 6500 calls per week and the advisors must be ready to answer questions on such a wide range of issues, it would be impossible to retain all the knowledge required to perform their role.
Different teams within LBBD provide assistance, such as a Generics Team, who deal with enquiries relating to housing, parking, highways and other services delivered by the council, the Repairs team who deal with repair requests for council maintained properties and the scheduling of the appointments and also a Revenue and Benefits team who deal with enquiries relating
to council tax, rent and benefit support.
The Universal Knowledge base provides configurable layouts for different teams to ensure that a user sees their information as soon as they log in, making the process of finding information as simple as possible. With the ability for all users to provide feedback in the case of missing or inaccurate information in the knowledge base, LBBD can easily maintain the information, to ensure queries are answered quickly and accurately.
Due to the success of the knowledge base within the contact centre since the upgrade, LBBD have recently rolled out the usage to the ‘Universal Solutions’ team, which provide additional support for citizens in the community, such as Walk-In Centres and also staff based in libraries and nurseries. With a one stop shop for sharing information within Universal Knowledge, LBBD can
continue to provide outstanding levels of customer service to the citizens within their borough.
LBBD have worked with Knowledge Powered Solutions (KPS) for over 8 years, to ensure a single version of the truth is easily captured, maintained and searchable for its employees. A recent upgrade took LBBD from an older version of Universal Knowledge to KPS’ new platform, which they have implemented as a SaaS solution. With only a handful of days of Professional Services from Knowledge Powered Solutions and a Train the Trainer approach to rollout, the new platform was up and running in just a few weeks.