Since 2011, we have worked with the Wandsworth London Borough Council local authority to support their print and mail requirements that help them reach their citizens. Wandsworth is a London Borough in southwest London; forming part of inner London.
As the local authority responsible for the Wandsworth area, Wandsworth London Borough Council is responsible for the billing, collection and recovery of key revenue streams for the Council, as well as the assessment and payment of Benefit and Housing Benefit claims. Further to this is the assessment and payment of Housing Benefit and Council Tax Reduction claims along with single person discounts and disability discounts.
Delivering transactional communications to local authority clients is nothing new, but the challenge is to ensure this service is continually updated to reflect the needs of Wandsworth London Borough Council as the client, its audiences and changing regulations i.e. GDPR.
In providing multiple bespoke services, we work with a number of departments with as many as 50 different stakeholders across the Council providing communication solutions for various purposes including for their revenues and benefits requirements. Furthermore, and not uncommon across local authorities, each department operates different systems and have a varied degree of processes, meaning that the data required to conduct the various forms of revenues and benefits mailings is provided in different raw data types and formats.
Combine these elements and you have the challenge of balancing the need for service evolution, innovation and agility to support change with what is essentially a standard requirement across local authorities nationwide.
We work closely with the leading suppliers of revenues and benefits software and as a result we have developed and configured our systems to read the data as per the data mapping and file layouts presented by the software for each product. We developed a ‘common interface’ data import technique for all data which means that any of the revenues and benefits software providers’ systems can be integrated with our data processing and production environments with minimal development. This means that different departments can continue to provide data packets in the formats they are used to without the need to change/develop their internal architecture.
This solution benefits all of our local authority clients, but was expressly identified by Wandsworth London Borough Council as a challenge as they had previously struggled with the reformatting of data. We currently provide print and mail services for the production of Revenues and Benefits documents covering Council Tax Notifications, Non-Domestic Rates, BID Mailers & Council house rent statements and ad-hoc critical communications.
We have experience of matching the various documents streams via a unique numeric identifier (typically the Council Tax reference number) in order to produce Bill/Benefit matching to improve the customer experience but also optimise the postal costs.
To automate the service, we implemented a Wandsworth London Borough Council SFTP for the secure transfer of data between the parties. Operating to agreed SLA, Wandsworth London Borough Council submits the data via the SFTP where our automation software processes the data for quality assurance and securely transfers the file to a secure production server without manual intervention.
Finally, we dispatch the mail packs via our own C9 postal licence via Adare Post to optimise costs and drive consistency of delivery dates.
Our ability to manage various different types of raw data in multiple formats, arriving via different departments and coordinate these into a single channel was one of the main reasons Wandsworth London Borough Council decided to adopt our solution.
We provided significant savings through the use of our Adare Post solution, but in addition to that we are able to provide detailed information regarding dispatch and delivery into the postal network.
Furthermore, our ability to seamlessly combine revenues and benefits services alongside a fully integrated hybrid mail solution added additional time and cost benefits when answering queries and sending further correspondence.
