Gandlake

Just one month after the launch of a new e-presentment platform at London Borough of Sutton Council, 200 citizens are registered to access an electronic account to view their Council Tax and Business Rates account balances and statements, a list of payments, installments to be paid and discount or exemption details.

Currently registering around 50 citizens per week, the Council expects to register a further 1000 citizens by the end of 2007. Overall, the Council is aiming to register between two and five per cent of its total tax paying households for the service each year.

The ability of citizens to answer smaller enquiries themselves through a combination of self-service technologies, including the e-presentment platform, is enabling call centre staff to increase the number of telephone calls answered from 50 to 80 per cent.

“Taking a soft approach to the roll-out we buried the service quite deeply within our website and yet were still receiving two to three requests per day,” says John Grice executive head of customer services, London Borough of Sutton Council. “Now that we’ve moved promotion of the service to the front page of the website we have seen take-up increase to more than ten requests per day.”

Having viewed and interrogated balances and statements online and confident that demands and outstanding amounts are correct, citizens can also pay online through the e-presentment platform.

Working with IT outsourcing partner Steria, the Council has installed Gandlake’s Citizen’s Account e-presentment platform. The e-presentment platform is a vendor managed service ensuring quick and effective implementation without additional infrastructure costs, software licenses or ongoing support.

Authentication and enrolment for the service is handled locally by Gandlake.

The Authority-wide, non-silo approach of the Gandlake platform means an increasing number of council back office services are candidates for web enablement. London Borough of Sutton Council plans to extend the service in the future to offer online balances and statements for housing benefit overpayments and sundry debtors. The authority is also considering presenting online account statements for third party suppliers.

The Council also plans to use Gandlake Citizen’s Account Customer Service Access module to allow call centre staff to query citizens’ account information and view PDF images of statements and demands, just as they would be viewed by citizens. This further improves the efficiency and quality of telephone contact.

For additional information, please contact:

Gavin Loader
Mantis Public Relations
On behalf of Gandlake
Office: 020 8123 5949
Email: gavinloader@mantispr.co.uk

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