East Riding of Yorkshire Council – an SMS solution Case Study

East Riding of Yorkshire Council – Civica – TMS Send and Receive Text Messages with Civica APP

SMS messaging delivers instant benefits for sites looking to deliver service delivery improvement and show real efficiency gains whilst under financial pressure. It enables instant communication with officers, contractors or customers and is both easy to use and simple to deploy across a wide variety of services.

The two way text message integration enables SMS texts to be both sent from, and received by, the APP system with records being updated based on message content.

Messages can be sent as soon as incidents or jobs are received on the system and can be edited before sending to ensure relevant information is imparted to the recipient. Named members of staff/contractors can then act upon the message and, if appropriate, text updates back to the system and even close requests once they have been dealt with.

Message sending can be manually triggered from the system or scheduled to run automatically based on events or changes in the status of a particular record.

This feature uses report generator formats to identify records and allows, for example, fully automated appointment reminders or notifications to be sent directly to constituents.

Key Benefits:

SMS texting provides a modern service delivery mechanism and realises cost and efficiency savings:

Reduce Direct Costs

• Less job sheets required – save paper and printing costs
• Reduce trips back to the office – less travel time (petrol, CO2)
• Reduce phone calls

Improve Customer Satisfaction

• Send automated appointment reminders
• Send reminders for waste collections
• Provide new notification method for activities such as street sweeping
• Improve response times by contacting mobile officers
• Provides a new contact method for wider reach

Efficiency Savings

• Quicker notification process for internal staff and constituents
• No dual entry with SMS texts directly updating the system
• Reduced internal administration costs
• Easy to use, no training required

“Managing customer enquiries and ensuring our pest control team was continually updated with new customer requests and with updates to existing customer requests was an issue we needed to tackle. We wanted a technology that would allow us to instantly update the pest control team that was both cost effective and immediate.

We have been using SMS for four months now to communicate internally and we plan to roll the system out to communicate with customers directly too, reminding them of pest control appointments and giving them the option to change or cancel. This means we’re able to devote more time to customer service and provide our workers with a proven technology to improve efficiency.”
Fde
Aimee Lane, System Coordinator, East Riding of Yorkshire Council

About Civica

Civica is a market leader in software and services that help organisations to improve service delivery and efficiency, with specialist expertise in local government, social housing, enforcement and education.

Blending consulting, software and managed services, the group supplies more than 1,900 customers in the UK, Australia, Asia Pacific and the USA, including 94% of the UK’s local authorities, more than 200 social housing organisations and 50 of the UK’s 53 police forces.