Case studies

Case study: London Borough of Sutton

Customer Access improvement in the London Borough of Sutton: An action plan for delivering their vision for customers to use the most appropriate and cost effective channel and for the council to use the website as the ‘shop floor’, not just the ‘shop window’

Context

The London Borough of Sutton is committed to creating a council-wide model of customer access which is designed around customer needs and is delivered via the most efficient and cost-effective channels. As part of a recent review of customer access Kate Newhouse, Assistant Director at BDO, supported a member of Sutton’s team to analyse available data to understand at a high level who their customers were, where they were located and what their current usage, needs and preferences were when accessing the council’s services.

In summary, this analysis identified that based on the profile of Sutton’s residents, the current provision of access did not effectively match their needs and preferences and that by better targeting provision at specific customer groups for particular services, customers could be migrated to more appropriate and, in the main, lower cost channels.

Following this, BDO were commissioned to work alongside Sutton to:

• Capitalise on the momentum and understanding generated by the initial analysis to drive Sutton’s customer access and channel migration work forward at pace;

• Develop a detailed strategy and action plan for customer access in Sutton outlining the council-wide priorities for channel migration;

• Design and plan a prioritised list of tangible, deliverable and cost-saving projects from across the council that would enable Sutton to achieve the customer access aims set out in the strategy.

The result

In a short period of time, Sutton have moved from understanding who their customers are and their channel preferences, to understanding what this information means in terms of practically changing the way Sutton delivers information to and transacts with its residents. The evaluation of the cost, benefit and deliverability of each individual project has equipped Sutton with a clear evidence base on which to judge which opportunities have the most potential to deliver significant savings and improvements to the customer experience for the least investment of limited resources.

Going forward we will be supporting the Sutton team to develop a detailed plan for a proportion of the projects setting out exactly what needs to be done to deliver the change. The aim is that the selected projects will deliver actual savings by the end of the year, and that this will inspire a behaviour change within services so that customer access is seen as a core enabler of delivering improved, lower cost services rather than a customer services ‘add-on’. Our intention is to build skills transfer into the next phase of work so that the Sutton team can deliver these – and future projects – with no external support.

Testimonial

"Encouraging our residents towards more cost-effective and convenient ways of contacting the council and actively shaping demand is a major strategic objective for us. Working with BDO has injected energy and focus into our customer access work and clarified where we should be focusing our efforts and limited resources to make the biggest difference. In short timescales, the BDO team have provided structure and direction to our approach to channel migration, and have combined a real understanding of Sutton’s situation with valuable insights from across the sector to deliver an ambitious and forward-thinking strategy and action plan. BDO’s contribution has made a critical difference in swiftly getting us to a point where we know what action we need to take to deliver our ultimate vision for customer access in Sutton.”

Gill Bull, Executive Head, Policy and Customer Services, London Borough of Sutton

Case study: East Sussex County Council

Support for East Sussex County Council’s corporate review of procurement

East Sussex County Council (ESCC) has targeted the development of ‘top class procurement to support top class commissioning’ as a key component of its strategy to deliver a £100m reduction to its revenue budget by 2014/15. The Council decided it needed to integrate, coordinate and target procurement activity better across the Council to improve the value delivered by staff involved in procurement. The role of the corporate procurement ‘lead’ is currently vacant and the Council also wanted to use this opportunity to review how the corporate procurement function operates across the organisation.

ESCC appointed BDO to work with, support and challenge all those involved in procurement to improve their approach and application of procurement, ensuring these improvements drew on best practice from both private and public sectors. In order to deliver the Council’s requirements we worked with the Council’s project team to:

• Review current procurement spending across the Council to identify overlaps in what departments are spending money on and which suppliers they are using;
• Facilitate workshops with senior procurement and commissioning staff to clarify the linkages between procurement and commissioning activities, identify the Council’s shared priorities for procurement, agree how category management can be used to change procurement practice across the Council;
• Develop the scope for category management ‘prototypes’ which will demonstrate how a category management approach will join up previously fragmented procurement practice and improve the Council’s negotiating position with suppliers.

Since starting the review, the joint BDO/ESCC team has made rapid progress, by building engagement and momentum amongst key procurement staff across the Council and by developing an overarching vision for how procurement will be delivered in the future.

Our joint project team submitted a final report to the Council’s Chief Officers Management Team (COMT) on 8th June setting out our recommendations for the category management prototypes, the lead corporate procurement role and further opportunities to improve procurement practice across the Council. The recommendations were agreed by COMT and the Council is currently planning how best to deliver the changes. 

Testimonial

“We decided to bring in external consultants to work alongside our internal team to deliver a council-wide review of procurement as we wanted to challenge those involved in procurement to come up with an agreed vision for how procurement could be improved across the Council. We commissioned BDO as we felt that they offered the optimum mix of best practice procurement experience, facilitation and engagement skills, and understanding of how to deliver change in local authorities. We have been very impressed by BDO’s support to date. They have contributed significantly to the first stage of our review, providing practical advice, a challenging yet approachable perspective and much-needed momentum. Most importantly they have worked as an integrated part of our project team, ensuring that we retain control and ownership over the review.” 

Rita Stebbings, Assistant Director of Resources, Adult Social Care Department, Project Co-Sponsor