Case Study: Manchester City Council Prioritized 62% of Emails With Netcall

The Challenge

Manchester City Council’s Revenues & Benefits service receives more than 3,000 emails each month from residents, businesses, landlords, agents and other stakeholders.

These cover a wide range of topics, including account queries, requests for information, changes in circumstances and general service enquiries.

As emails are often unstructured, every message had to be manually reviewed to determine the appropriate action, before being indexed and uploaded to the council’s document management system (DMS) for processing. This took up valuable officer time and created a significant administrative burden.

Email remains an important customer contact channel – it can’t simply be switched off. While the council had encouraged customers to use online forms, many enquiries still arrived via email.

Closing the inboxes would inhibit customer choice – impacting efficiency and increasing pressure on higher-cost channels, such as the contact centre.

Manchester City Council needed to manage growing email volumes without asking officers to spend their time manually reading, classifying and routing every message.

The Solution

Manchester City Council partnered with Govtech to implement Inbox Assistant, combining webCAPTURE digital process automation with Liberty IDP (intelligent document processing).

The council’s previous solution relied heavily on customers providing a valid account reference number (ARN). When information was missing or incorrect, emails required manual intervention, limiting automation and creating delays.

Manchester wanted an intelligent solution to understand the content of emails and attachments. It would identify the information required for processing and determine the appropriate next action – regardless of whether an ARN had been supplied.

The objectives were to:

• Increase automatic indexing rates
• Reduce reliance on ARNs
• Identify customers using alternative information, such as addresses and personal details
• Analyse email content to determine the nature of the enquiry
• Automatically categorize correspondence into the correct document and work types
• Improve workload prioritization
• Support greater end-to-end email automation across existing workflows.

Inbox Assistant reads and understands incoming correspondence, extracts relevant information and automatically guides each email towards the right outcome.

A tenancy change can be processed automatically. A general enquiry can be categorized and routed to the right team. Emails requiring action can be prepared for intelligent document processing with less manual intervention.

The Results

• Immediate results measurable from the first month of the deployment
• 3,218 emails triaged – 100% automated handling
• 62% prioritized – 1,997 emails automatically categorized and prioritized
• 1.3 FTE equivalent saved from inbox administration and revenues processing
• 20% instant responses – 653 emails were provided with instant, automated responses
• 18% fully automated – 568 landlord tenancy change cases were automated end-to-end
• Future potential to automate more of the work traditionally associated with incoming email

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This post has been re-published by kind permission of Netcall - view the original article.

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Reviewed by: Jo Robinson