5 May 2006

A new project in Staffordshire has seen several local councils collaborating on IT services, with the result that they cut costs and improved the level of service they offered.

The ten councils involved, known collectively as Staffordshire Connects (SC), believe they have saved as much as £1.8 million, most on customer relationship management (CRM), through joint procurements since they made the switch four years ago.

SC formed when it became clear that it was not cost-effective for them to all run parallel services, and immediately set as its target on using IT to improve its response to service requests.

Mike Loveless, SC's programme assurance and technology manager, explained to Silicon.com: "We are beginning to run our services over the internet now.

"That means we can get a record of the services we're providing and this helps to improve services overall. We've saved million through this."

As well as using a CRM system purpose-built for the public sector, CS has also managed to save money by running VoIP services over the councils' joint network.

Collaboration has brought a further benefit that, if one council's call centre becomes overloaded with calls, callers can simply be switched to the line of one of the other groups' call centres.

© Adfero Ltd

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