Bolton Metro Borough Council

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Bolton Metro Borough Council - Customer relationships management

As a forward thinking local authority, Bolton is trying to improve the service it delivers to local people. Bolton called in Fujitsu to provide management consultancy and to help shape the policy for future development. Fujitsu was chosen because it had good experience of customer relationship management. Read more about the benefits Bolton's metro council experienced.

The Challenge

Bolton Metro is a large borough on the edge of Greater Manchester in the north west of England. As a forward thinking local authority, Bolton is trying to improve the service it delivers to local people, and had experimented with a small One Stop Shop in the district of Farnworth.

The One Stop Shop provided a single access point where customers could come to discuss problems and transact any business with the Council, rather than having to visit different departments or offices.

Receiving positive feedback from customers, Bolton decided to look at how the One Stop services concept could be extended to the rest of the Borough, and how existing services could be improved.

The Solution

Bolton called in Fujitsu to provide management consultancy and to help shape the policy for future development. Fujitsu was chosen because it had already helped to implement similar One Stop services in other large local authorities and had good experience of customer relationship management.

Fujitsu’s expertise helped Bolton to:

• Manage organisational changes necessary for a borough-wide network of One Stop services.
• Introduce new analysis of customer profiles and preferences.
• Shape the vision of a service that allowed customers to deal with the Council in different ways (face-to-face, over the phone, via the internet, through information kiosks, or by interactive TV) and build and develop an implementation plan.

The Benefits

The Bolton team, made up of Chief Officers from all departments, with the support of Fujitsu refined its ideas about the One Stop services concept, and identified how the operation of the Council would have to change in order to deliver services in this way right across the Borough. Fujitsu is now working with the Bolton team to build an action plan to implement the changes.

Other expected benefits include improved customer satisfaction ratings, gained through greater customer convenience, and increased operational effectiveness.

The Implementation

Fujitsu consultants worked alongside the Bolton team to help formulate a detailed policy to build on the initial success of the Farnworth experiment and to replicate it across the Borough.

The strategy is far-reaching and requires fundamental changes across most Council departments. In some cases it requires a shifting of responsibilities, and all these changes need to be handled carefully and sensitively.

Fujitsu advised on how this could be done, and helped in creating the strategy to deliver targeted customer services using a range of different channels with inbuilt flexibility.

The Expertise

Fujitsu was chosen by Bolton because of its unrivalled experience, which includes:

• Implementing One Stop services in other local authorities-such as Leeds City Council and the London Borough of Lewisham in the UK, and also in a number of communities in Finland.
• Customer Relationship Management - Fujitsu has managed sophisticated CRM implementations for major organisations around the world, in both the public and private sectors.
• A combination of management consultancy skills, plus a solid background in IT.
• A long and in-depth understanding of local government.