Northumberland County Council (NCC) has launched its My Northumberland online customer portal in time to maximise ‘take-up’ opportunities over the annual billing period. Gandlake’s secure customer portal will be used to deliver a suite of online services to residents, businesses and landlords including Council Tax, Business Rates and Benefits. Together these form some of the highest volume contact areas in the council and by moving these transactions online NCC expects to save over £1m within the next three years.

The council deal with over 200,000 telephone and face to face transactions each year along with a print and postage spend in excess of £300,000. These are both high cost channels which provide a huge opportunity for savings that the council are firmly focussed on delivering.

The portal provides citizens and businesses with a single login to multiple services allowing them to view documents and statements online, drill down to Payments, Liabilities, Charges, Instalment plans and other transactional information, exactly the type of transactions that the contact centre has to deal with in huge volumes.

Online documents are displayed exactly as they appear on paper so the customer is much less likely to need to talk to a member of staff and much more likely to select paperless billing which they can do easily with a simple mouse click.

“One of the reasons we selected Gandlake’s secure portal solution is that documents are displayed as they appear in paper form. With such an easy to understand format customers are far more likely to select the paperless billing option and this should provide us with an instant and significant saving. This was one of the unique factors that made the difference and enhanced our business case significantly.

“Gandlake  delivered their digital platform, to time and to the original budget which has enabled us to meet our priority target of being ‘live’  in time for Annual Billing 2016/17. The project team worked excellently together to deliver to some very tight timescales, which will significantly help to drive take-up of the service. Our plans include adding more services to My Northumberland throughout the year.” – Graeme Barnes, Revenue, Benefits and Customer Services Manager, Northumberland County Council.

Northumberland County Council have also selected Gandlake’s library of intelligent transactions enabling Direct Debit applications, Single Person Discounts and Moving In, Out and Within, which will be fully automated and integrated meaning information entered online by the customer is automatically sent to the back office removing the requirement for manual re-keying.These forms also enable “Assisted Digital” meaning Customer Service staff within the council can operate on behalf of customers, whilst they are on the phone or in the council building.

“We are really pleased to have Northumberland on board which further secures Gandlake’s position as market leader in the local government Channel Shift space. Having them as part of our user community will add significant value, enabling them to share innovation, best practice and experiences with our network of customers. They all have a common goal of delivering exceptional customer service, with decreasing budgets and increasing volumes” – Brian Harris, MD Gandlake.