Firmstep

Chelmsford City Council Drives Self-Service

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:00:27 +0100

Chelmsford City Council’s customer services manager was recently interviewed by Computer Weekly on how it is centralising provision of its services, and deriving early benefits from moving key services online.

In just 6 months, two of the Council’s most popular services (applications for residents’ parking permits and senior railcards) have achieved nearly 50% channel shift, enabling service staff to better assist residents without internet access, helping to deliver improved services across all of its public communications channels.

The full story is here.

A new article on driving persistent channel shift

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:44:38 +0100

The public sector portal PublicNet has run the latest article from Firmstep CEO, Brett Husbands, showing how councils and LAs can approach channel shift to ensure they deliver significant, ongoing efficiency gains and public benefits, using online channels in real time to achieve true service transformation.

The article describes how to achieve iterative channel shift, in which people using either call centre or in-person services can receive initial assistance via those channels, and be guided towards online self-service options. In effect, gently encouraging people online, even while they are using other access channels.

As examples, London Borough of Bexley’s self-service portal gives easy, intuitive access to over 30 online services and in less than a year, it has moved 18% of transactions from its call centre to online, giving an estimated saving of around £40,000 per year – a figure that is still growing. North Lincolnshire Council had 1.5% of households create self-service accounts within a month of its portal going live, without any publicity. And Chelmsford City Council achieved nearly 50% channel shift in two key services in just 5 months from a standing start.

Shift priorities

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:00:13 +0100

New research just published by UKAuthority.com has revealed some interesting differences between the public requirements of channel shift, and authorities’ perception of what they should deliver. The survey of 173 public sector bodies showed steady development of channel shift across all service areas, but revealed some “significant concerns” including a lack of detailed strategy for channel shift on the part of many public sector organisations.

Just 46.5% of respondents said that their organisations have a formal strategy in place for delivering channel shift, although local government seemed slightly better prepared than central government.

The key to boosting the pace of channel shift is ensuring a consistent user experience, according to over 85% of respondents, with measuring user feedback seen as a key activity.

Respondents’ top five service priorities for channel shift were council tax, rubbish and recycling, planning, social care and housing; while the most frequently visited by the public were rubbish and recycling; libraries; job vacancies; leisure facilities and schools.

In terms of barriers to channel shift, integrating legacy IT systems was the biggest issue, with 59.0% of respondents agreeing that legacy systems are difficult to integrate with new online services.

London Borough of Bexley Drives Channel Shift Using Firmstep

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:00:36 +0100

London Borough of Bexley is transforming its customer services using a new online self-service environment developed using Firmstep’s AchieveService and Self portal solutions. The environment was developed by Bexley together with its IT partner Steria, and gives residents a common interface to securely access local services using a range of intelligent e-forms.

This is driving channel shift across a number of key services, including waste and recycling, highways, and school admissions, with many others in development. Whether customers go online to the portal, call in by phone or visit in person, the same e-form is now being completed, providing consistency across all access channels and reduced maintenance overheads. The online portal enables the public to access over 100 of the Borough’s services with nearly 1,800 self-service form requests being made per month.

Mark Ramus, customer service web development manager at the London Borough of Bexley said: “Using AchieveService and Self from Firmstep has enabled us to develop and deploy highly efficient, automated public services that link with our back office systems for a true end-to-end experience. This provides our residents with greater access to services and generates ongoing savings by reducing call volumes and manual data entry which feeds into the Council’s overall savings strategy.”

Bexley introduced online handling of waste and recycling requests in March 2012, and reports that close to 30% of routine waste and recycling transactions have now channel shifted to online. Read more about the deployment here.

North Lincolnshire Council’s New Self-Serve Portal a Hit with the Public

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:00:52 +0000

North Lincolnshire Council’s new self-service portal, built using Firmstep’s Self, has enjoyed considerable success with local residents in the two months since its launch.

The Council’s new portal features 50 of its most commonly-used services online – from waste collection, parking penalty charges, to free school meals and job applications. Already, over 1,400 people have set up a self-service account, and nearly 2,000 e-forms have been submitted via the portal.

The portal is live at: www.northlincs.gov.uk/quickclick

East Riding's popular Website Enquiry form now available

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:56:04 +0000

East Riding has shared a form which allows citizens to send website general enquiry forms. In the last two months of 2012 the form received over 6000 submissions, showing how simple it is to fill out. Popularity keeps increasing and is proving to push the public to choose this channel over calling the council.

Demo and download the form here to see if you can cause a channel shift too!

Equal Opportunities Monitoring, made available to be added to your forms

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:40:06 +0000

Do you need to include a section in your forms to comply with government equality monitoring? Would you like a really easy way to do this with your forms? By collecting equal opportunities data online, Councils can on average save between £2-£6 per submission, depending on the ratio of online forms that would have otherwise been filled out on paper or by a CSA. Liverpool City Council has created an excellent example of such a form which we have made generic for everybody to use. This has been shared on our Forms Catalogue to demo and download. We’ve also supplied some simple instructions on how to copy the form into a section of any new or pre-existing form. There’s even a video to talk you through it. More here.

Need Help Searching for Forms?

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:32:50 +0000

Firmstep are sharing another great time saving technique with a simple but effective form to help you search through your forms and processes. This will make it so much easier; searching for a form by name with the form location, links to design view and status updates etc. being available to you during the search stage. Finding the right form has just become a lot more efficient!

To check out more click here

‘Tell a Friend’ Technique Shared

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:35:08 +0000

A Great Practice has been prepared this week to show you how you can use Javascript to capture the referral url (the page they were sent from) to recommend a page to a friend or send feedback. As an example we have built a simple “Tell a Friend” form that you can link to in the footer of your website to allow people to email that URL to another person.

The set up is really simple, you just need to import this form into your platform site and once you have configured the email template you just publish the form and note the URL.

We’ve provided some useful instructions and even a video to talk you through it. Check out more here.

Online Form for Finding Childcare Now Shared!

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:34:54 +0000

Northamptonshire’s ‘Need Help Finding Childcare’ form is fast becoming a very popular form, now averaging 350-400 submissions a year. It has been saving the Council a lot of time and money and now it’s been shared with you. Feel free to check out more on our wiki, where you can demo or download the form. We’ve even provided a video to run you though how it works and some useful instructions to get it up and running on your AchieveForms platform.

Click here to find out more

More Great Practices Shared! ‘Have Your Say’ and ‘Contact us’ Forms

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:37:16 +0000

Liverpool City Council have kindly shared two awesome forms for you to demo and download today! The ‘Have Your Say Form’ records compliments, complaints and comments and has received over 12,400 submissions. The Council estimate that it saves them 137 hours of work a year. The ‘Contact Us Form’ has also received over 6,000 submissions, which is good considering it’s a new edition to their forms collection. Designed to be quick and easy to submit, each form only has a few short sections to complete. These forms will be a great addition to your form collection. They have been beneficial to helping push a channel shift for Liverpool, and with a little help from Firmstep, they have been made generic so that pretty much as soon as you export them onto your AchieveForms system they will be ready to use.

These forms save the Council a great deal of time and money, and they can for you too! To find out more, demo or download these forms click here!

'Flat Pack' Branding

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 19:38:00 +0000

Want awesome branding with minimal effort? For everyone who would like a fresh look for their AchieveForms, Firmstep are sharing this attractive easy-to-deploy web branding.

To check out more click here!

Need Help Switching your site to HTTPS?

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:09:00 +0000

For this week’s Great Practice we are sharing some useful hints and tips to switch your site to https with relative ease. You may be aware that you can ‘Force Secure Server’ in Form Details, but this is not an option for processes and it may be preferable to apply https across your entire site. We’ve made some really simple instructions and even provided a video to talk you through it.

Find out more about how easy it can be here!

Council Tax General Enquiries Form Gets 10,000 Submissions-Now Shared!

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:41:11 +0000

South Ribble District Council have developed an extremely successful Council Tax General Enquiries Form. It has had a total of 9,666 submissions since its creation in October 2010. Of these cases, 6,283 were resolved there and then, and 3,383 were sent to the Council Tax Department to be processed.

More than half of the enquiries are being dealt with in less than a minute. Being able to use this form has therefore helped the council enormously in dealing with the intake of Council Tax related enquiries. It has been used as part of their AcheieveService systems. Now we have simplified the process into a form that can be used any AchieveForms user.

Check out more here!

Report It Form Now Shared as a Great Practice!

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 17:31:28 +0000

The Report It Form has proven to be pretty tricky to create. We have built and shared a version that can be pretty much universally used in Local Government. We’ve taken on a host of great ideas from customer’s designs as well as articles published by Firmstep Consultants to deliver a Great Practice Report It Form.

The form collects key details from the form filler and allows them to pick the exact location of the incident in an embedded Google Map. They then have the choice to be kept up to date with the issue with some conditional options.

To check out more, demo or download the form click here!

Another Great Practice Shared-School Meals Payment Form

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:33:04 +0000

North Lincolnshire Council have kindly shared an online School Meals Payment Form. This means Parents can pay for school meals online using a credit or debit card. Last year this form had 16,000 submissions. With the average transaction cost being just under £20 it is processing payments of just over £300,000 a year.

Previous to this form children would have to take money into school or a few schools would allow people to make payments over the phone which was obviously more time consuming and costly for the council to process. There is also decreased risk of loss as the child does not have to carry cash, as well as swipe card systems allowing potential monitoring for healthy eating initiatives.

The potential cost savings are huge. Using SOCITM’s latest figures a phone call could cost the council as much as £2.83 when an online visit would be in the region of £0.15. Processing 16000 such applications over the phone using these figures could cost in the region of £45,000. Online this could be as little as £2400

To check out more, demo or download the form click here!

Lincolnshire’s Online Transport Application has over 8000 submissions- Now Shared!

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:02:35 +0000

Lincoln has created a very popular online school transport application, which has over 8000 submissions since its creation in 2010. It has pushed an awesome channel shift for the Council, which has saved them a great deal of time and money.

The form can be integrated with your database, and data lookups can be added for address fields to ensure that all data collected by this form is as accurate as possible. It is so simple; you can even use video tutorials to talk you through the form before you export it.

To demo or download this form, check out more here!

Newcastle saving estimated £4235 by using online Library Membership Form

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 17:31:49 +0000

This Library Membership form has proven extremely successfull, getting around 500 submissions a month for Newcastle City Council. Not only does it present citizens with an easy alternative to contacting the council directly regarding joining the library, or replacing a lost or out of date card. It has helped the Council to deal more efficiently with the amount of submissions they have received, as well as helping the processing of this data. It is estimated that 500 face to face interactions for this form, would cost the Council £4310 per month (at £8.62 a time)

You can demo or download this form here!

Expense and Mileage Forms Shared as Great Practice!

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:27:47 +0000

Firmstep are sharing our very own expense and mileage claim forms as an example of a great practice in action. These forms are used by all staff to record and view their expenses. We’ve tried to include the whole package of forms and associated lookups, so that after you follow the simple instructions on the link below, you should be able to use them almost straight away, with very few changes required. One of the forms we’ve included is an admin form which allows the accounts department to view, authorise or reject expenses claims.

They are simple, easy to use form and save a lot of time!

But you don’t need to take our word for it. Check out more here.

6 Deprivation of Libert Safeguard Forms Shared Here!

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:41:11 +0000

The Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DOLS) regulatory framework needs to be administred by UK Local Authoritues and PCTs. There are 6 forms that comprise DOLS, as listed on the Department of Health Website. These forms are now available to download from the Forms Catalogue, courtesy of London Borough of Merton.

Many councils simply list downloadable PDF files; as an AchieveForms customer you can download the forms below and import them with very little modifiction required, and have great-looking functional eforms instead, cutting-out lots of wasted paper and time.

Check out more here!