North Lanarkshire Council has announced the completion of a successful customer data cleansing and matching exercise to transform the quality of its citizen records and improve customer service efficiency for citizens contacting the council.
In a council-wide improvement project to create a complete view of all citizen information, North Lanarkshire Council turned to Experian QAS and the Improvement Service to analyse thousands of customer records from across the council, including council tax and housing benefit information.
Using Experian QAS’s data cleansing and de-duplication tools, the exercise analysed thousands of customer records held across multiple systems and databases. The bottom line benefits to emerge from the exercise included:
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24% improvement in quality of Council Tax records
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21% improvement in quality of Housing Benefit records
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freeing up the equivalent of one full time member of staff’s time for release into front line service delivery
The exercise resulted in the creation of ‘a single customer view’ across several key data sets used by the council to deliver services. At the same time, it demonstrated the real potential to divert savings into supporting front line services from the shorter times taken to improve the quality of the data, and from the reduced staff effort it involved.
Peter Tolland, Customer Services Manager, North Lanarkshire Council says, “Information sits at the heart of every service we provide to our citizens and having access to high quality and timely data is absolutely crucial to our day to day operations. With the complete review of our records, we will be able to respond more quickly to queries and citizens will benefit from more efficient and effective service provision.”
Joel Curry, Managing Director of Experian QAS adds, “We’ve welcomed the opportunity to work in partnership with the Improvement Service and North Lanarkshire Council to demonstrate how our data and analytical tools and capabilities can be used to deliver practical and positive effect to the benefit of the Council and other public service providers”.
