County Council Embarks on Digital Transformation Journey

Originally formed in 1889 by the Local Government Act 1888, Leicestershire County Council (LCC) is one of 27 county councils in the UK. The county is divided into 52 electoral divisions, which return a total of 55 councillors and currently includes 7 district councils.

The council’s roles and responsibilities have changed significantly over time. Key responsibilities and funding today include: Social care for adults and children, Support for schools, Highways and transport, Public health, Waste disposal, Economic development, Libraries and museums, Strategic planning, Trading standards, Country parks, Registration of births, marriages and deaths and Community leadership.

The ICT Department of LCC has demonstrated that same drive and, in 2016, embarked on a Digital Transformation Journey, embracing Marval’s cloud-based IT service management (ITSM) solution and metamorphosing Service Management to deliver improved customer services in a modern, agile enterprise.

The Challenge

Leicestershire County Council (LCC), like many other councils was in a period of severe budgetary reduction and efficiency improvement, affecting both front line and supporting services. In 2016, LCC made the decision to rethink the traditional model of ICT delivery, while satisfying the ever-growing demand to provide better, faster and more efficient public services. 

The transformation was born from a strategy of replacing their old ICT model with a new organisation-wide, data and service delivery model that fully exploits Cloud Services and innovative technologies. This would enable the provision of ICT services fit for purpose for its user base while also delivering efficiency for its key customers, LCC and its business units. 

The aim was to reduce contacts to the Service Desk to increase efficiency, provide service users with more control over requests and fault reporting and shorten the end to end lifespan of all requests within the ITSM system.
A key element of ICT Services Digital Transformation journey metamorphosing LCC Service Management and simplifying the customer experience with a refreshed, cloud-based ITSM solution – Marval MSM and associated processes. 

The Project

LCC partnered with Marval for the refresh. LCC had been a Marval customer for over 10 years and awarded the contract in a competitive tender to deliver its cloud-based solutions.

“The Marval project team understood the project outcomes and deliverables, and provided a clear vision for delivering both an efficiency saving and an improvement to the service delivery.” Stuart Beale, ICT Customer Support Team Manager. LCC elected to implement Marval MSM to help achieve its service improvement key goals of delivering professional, economic, effective and efficient customer-centric IT support services to its customers by:

• Improving  the request journey: automating requests to correct resolver team, eliminating double handling and reducing steps to get requests from A to Z
• Improving the Customer Self-Service Portal to; capture all required information in one pass, automate and simplify Service Requests, empower customers and provide knowledge articles for self-solve
• Reducing the number of contacts to the Service Desk; minimising request bounce between ICT and customer, capturing all required information in one pass reducing in and outbound calls 

The Result

Implementation of the project helped LCC reach critical defined KPIs related to efficiency,  cost management, effective workload management and service improvement including: 

• Releasing resources (workflow rerouted, shift left, First Time fixes)
• Empowering customers (via delivery of a customer service catalogue service requests converted to online forms)
• Improving efficiency (a level of automation enabled on lifecycle of live calls)
• Increasing team performance, collaboration and job satisfaction
• Boosting Customer Satisfaction and the perception of ICT
• Improving Customer Experience and value
• Improving Business, stakeholder and customer confidence in LCC ICT
• Developing an ongoing culture of continual service improvement

Within the 12 months since implementation, the LCC team is able to manage 9,000 requests on average per month, of which 93% are fixed within the SLA timeframe. As a result, LCC has recorded 40% reduction in backlog, an abandon rate of less than 9% (27% in November 2016) and a 93% customer satisfaction (80% in 2016).

LCC have also seen a 46% decrease in contacts to the Service Desk with email requests down to 10% (50% in 2016). This has been achieved primarily through the expanded use and exploitation use of the web-based Service Catalogue function of Marval MSM. Service Users have adopted the Customer Portal in far greater numbers than expected by the Project team with an uplift of 30% self-service portal use. 

“Web-based service requests are automatically routed directly to the appropriate resolving teams or analysts therefore bypassing the Service Desk handling element. The forms reduce the manual and double handling of requests and capture all the relevant and required information to help solve the request.” explained Stuart Beale.

Using Marval’s ITSM solution, LCC are easily able to monitor, measure and report on a wide range of satisfaction, process improvement and performance figures. All these measures come as standard enabling them to support ISO/IEC 20000, ISO 27001 and SDI SDC evidence.