Stirling Council was established as a Unitary Council following the re-organization of Scottish Local Government in 1996. The Council provides all Council services in the area, including schools, housing, social services, planning, education, rubbish collection and re-cycling, transport and roads, leisure, arts and events, youth services, training, benefits and council tax collection.

Stirling Council, serving one of the fastest growing cities in Scotland, receives 320,000 calls a year from local citizens, mostly for its ‘fix-it’ services, such as cleansing, pest control, road and street lighting, and housing repairs. These enquiries were traditionally handled by a number of different answering points within the council and subsequently logged, categorized and forwarded to the relevant service department; a time and labor intensive process that was slowing the council’s response to requests. And as the process of distribution for bills of work was manual, work reports could get lost or misplaced for a period of time, delaying and inhibiting the services the council provided to its citizens.

In 2000, the council received over £1m from the Modernizing Government Fund for its Modernizing Government program, Access Stirling. A key element of this program was a citizen contact center designed to deal with the high volume of enquiries to the council and to provide local citizens with better access to essential services, in line with the Modernizing Government Agenda.

Stirling’s vision was to make access to the council as easy as possible, to enable its staff to listen and respond better to local citizens, and to deliver quality services, efficiently and effectively. To achieve this, it needed a solution that could address its immediate need to streamline key processes and that would integrate with existing systems and scale as its citizen contact centre expanded into other areas.

Stirling Council chose Metastorm BPM, a Business Process Management solution used by more than 1200 governmental and commercial organizations around the world, as a backbone to drive processes within and between its contact center and service departments.

“Initially we considered implementing a CRM application with a view to improving call centre operations,” says Alan MacDonald, Network Services Manager and Access Stirling Technical Architect, Stirling Council. “It rapidly became clear that none of the CRM solutions we evaluated were able to provide an end-to-end solution for service delivery that links our contact centre advisors to service department staff in the way that Metastorm’s BPM solution does, without a huge investment in bespoke technology development and integration.”

Metastorm’s BPM technology improves the council’s efficiency by logging, routing and tracking citizen requests automatically, allowing staff to focus on customer care and task execution. It also enables both contact centre and frontline staff to view the current status and a detailed history of each of their requests, promoting internal accountability and ownership. The system has the flexibility to adapt to the scope and scale of Stirling’s future requirements as its Modernizing Government program expands, and integrates transparently with existing systems, such as Stirling’s Radius cash receipting system.

Metastorm BPM has already enabled the council to deliver faster, more efficient and more accessible services. In the first phase of implementation, Stirling’s citizens are benefiting from faster response times to cleansing enquiries. Prior to the launch of the Access Stirling citizen contact centre in September 2002, 25 per cent of calls to the council could not even be attended to due to the inefficiency of the legacy system. By contrast, 93 per cent of connected calls now made to the contact center are answered within 30 seconds.

“We needed a solution that would deliver significant efficiency improvements and allow our citizens to benefit from higher quality interaction with the council and improved service delivery, in line with the Modernizing Government Agenda,” says MacDonald. “Metastorm BPM manages the interaction we have with our citizens, whilst improving workflow and reducing the time it takes to process queries. It integrates well with our existing technology infrastructure and its inherent agility enables us to rapidly alter the scale and scope of our operations as our citizen contact centre expands into other areas. Metastorm’s BPM technology has had a significant positive effect on our local services, and we are confident that it will meet our future needs completely.”