Cornwall Council uses Microsoft Dynamics in its contact centre to optimise the citizen experience

Cornwall Council has a long-term strategy to create a single view of each citizen in order to improve the way people and communities in Cornwall interact with their council. At the same time, this unified data approach will enable the council to be more effective, efficient and proactive in its engagement with its citizens.
 

Creating this depth of single citizen view requires a structured approach. Strategically, to make the right long-term technology platform choices. Tactically, to address individual technology requirements in a coherent way when there is the business case to do so. For Cornwall Council, a tactical requirement emerged in October 2022 to replace an aging contact centre solution.
 

Jenny Payne, Head of Customer Experience and Improvement at Cornwall Council, explains, “Our contract centre takes up to 2,000 calls per day, over 20 different service areas.  We wanted to improve the employee experience in the contact centre as well as improving the citizen experience – giving our agents the ability to move quickly from subject to subject while ensuring the quality of records is good. Our overall aim is to provide the best customer experience we can, resolving most queries at the first touch point. The current CRM we use is old and didn’t offer us the flexibility we needed.”
 

Choosing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service 

Jenny Payne continues, “I came from the private sector, and I wanted to be able to give the residents of Cornwall a far better experience with their Council – so it feels as slick as dealing with a really good retailer.” 
 

To achieve this, the council looked at a number of different customer engagement solutions, explains Marcus Cosway, Enterprise Architect at Cornwall Council: “Our choice of customer engagement platform was about more than picking an application. There are other solutions that could deliver the functionality we needed – but they wouldn’t advance us like Microsoft Dynamics 365 does. It would just have been more of what we were doing. Given our ambitions as a council and our work towards a single view of the citizen, we needed a solution that could empower us to be much more transformative.”
 

This solution was Microsoft Dynamics 365. The team at Cornwall Council clearly envisioned how the Microsoft platform for modern work, spanning Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Azure, would facilitate its future ambitions, playing into the common data model and providing a single, extensible platform for a reduced overall cost of ownership and with class-leading extensions.
 

The benefits of taking an agile approach 

Having established the solution choice and the business case, the council then adopted an agile approach to solution delivery. An important part of agile philosophy is involving users at an early stage. James Long, Service Leader in the contact centre at Cornwall Council was the product process owner for this collection of user stories. 
 

“I joined the team right at the start, in October 2022,” he explains. “I liaise with our team members and hold surgeries to collect user feedback.” 
 

Steve Elsworthy, Head of Information Services at Cornwall Council, extolls the virtues of this approach: “Having James as product process owner enables us to get iterative feedback very quickly from those on the ground. The platform we’ve built with Microsoft technologies makes it easy to collaborate and make improvements in this way.” 
 

“The great thing about working in this way, where you can iterate very quickly, is that you can refine your backlog appropriately, deliver small changes, test it and get it live quickly,” agrees Matthew Smith, Product Manager for the customer experience platform at Cornwall Council.

Making use of standard features and functions

While the council is keen to develop iteratively in response to user and customer feedback, the team is also conscious to make full use of the native functionalities within Microsoft Dynamics 365. 
 

“We didn’t want a ‘Cornwall Council Dynamics’ because too much customisation can lead to problems with supporting and updating in the future,” says Matthew Smith. “Instead, we wanted to harness the existing technology to its best effect.” 
 

“The Dynamics 365 platform gives us the single view of the customer, the work scheduling, management, marketing, automation, chatbots – all the things we need,” agrees Marcus Cosway, “Plus, we can leverage the integration between the Microsoft products.” 
 

This includes the tight integration with Microsoft Teams as well as the native continuous development pipelines and tooling in Microsoft Azure, which support Cornwall Council’s agile approach.  
 

“Another outcome of this platform approach is our ability to build reusable components,” emphasises Matthew Smith. “We can implement many times using the same components, so it’s quicker and more consistent.”
 

An omni-channel approach that optimises resolution at first contact

The new solution puts the council in a much better position to engage with citizens on their preferred channel as well as enabling self-service with the use of Power Virtual Agents. This can be achieved with a much more consistent customer experience across all channels.  
 

Further, the integration Microsoft technologies facilitates the integration of back-office processes and eases migration across channels and service areas – so operations are much more efficient. As a result, the important goal of resolving issues faster and at first point of contact is already progressing – helping to drive efficiencies, optimise costs, boost KPIs and improve customer service. 
 

“Because the organisation has so many different parts to it, we do a lot of handing off – which is extremely frustrating for the customer,” acknowledges Jenny Payne. “We can now make it much easier to self-serve via our websites. And we’re excited how our contact agents can work across all channels. Whether contact is via the website, an agent in the call centre or via one of our chatbots, we want the query solved at that point.” 
 

This omni-channel approach will ultimately enhance the citizen experience for all Cornwall residents. 
 

“Not everyone is able to or wants to consume services in a digital way,” accepts Steve Elsworthy. “For those who do, we want to build the best possible digital experience. For those who don’t, we want to still provide the best possible experience by ensuring that the people in the council with whom they interact have access to the right information easily and at the right time so those experiences are optimised too and that the processes around them are efficient.”
 

Time back to contact centre agents 

“The organisational benefit so far can be measured in the time we’re saving per call,” says Jenny Payne. “But the improvement to the contact agent experience is probably the biggest change at the moment.” 
 

Matthew Smith explains, “We’re making sure we move data around appropriately between Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Customer Service and using APIs to gather data from other systems. This way, we can save the need for the contact centre agents to do a handoff or send a follow-up email or type up a case record because those processes have been automated and the details logged.” 
 

In parallel, the contact centre teams have taken the opportunity to rethink processes. For example, James Long explains, “We used to undertake customer verification 100 percent of the time. Now we determine whether we actually need to take a caller’s details. As an extreme example, if you’re reporting an overfilled bin the call duration has been cut by two thirds – from over three minutes to just over a minute.” 
 

Because contact centre agents now have a familiar look and feel for every different service request that they handle, James Long expects training and induction efforts to be streamlined and foreshortened. He says, “This standardised look and feel will have significant benefits to our users, our customers and to us as an organisation.”

Savings through standardisation

Choosing to standardise on the Microsoft platform has already delivered savings through cost avoidance. The council has met four business requirements internally without needing to procure different solutions. 
 

Leveraging the common data platform created by standardising on Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft Dataverse, Microsoft Azure and associated services, including Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to assure the “golden record” and together with the no-code and low-code development environment of Microsoft Power Platform, the team can create solutions internally to meet user requirements.  
 

As well as optimising the cost and speed of app delivery, the platform approach is facilitating and speeding up innovation. So far, this includes an integrated occupational health case-management solution, a decision wheel App based on the philosophical principles of donut economics, a tool for tree planting management as part of our Forest for Cornwall initiative and a workforce helpdesk solution to aid the management of HR caseloads.
 

Better value realised: towards the single view of the citizen 

Building this unified data platform across all council services enables the team to think more creatively about how to optimise services and deliver greater efficiencies.  
 

Steve Elsworthy cites the example of improving pothole reporting and repair, “In the future, citizens could have the ability to report potholes via a geotagged photo. That could be combined with other data, such as the CCTV on waste collection vehicles. We can automatically assess the need and whether action is already scheduled, then the teams involved in fixing them can be coordinated via automated workflows. And citizens and communities can be kept informed in the same automated way.”
 

Working with Microsoft

Cornwall Council has developed the necessary digital skills with support of its Microsoft partner, via its direct relationship with Microsoft and by the use of the available online learning resources.  
 

“It has felt at times that we’re at the leading edge of these technologies,” states Matthew Smith. “We’ve had a good, supportive relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft has helped us with support and improving documentation. It’s great to work together. Some of the things we were pushing for are now out-of-the-box functionality as part of the platform.” 
 

This continual development of Microsoft technologies is another important reason for the Cornwall team to be thrilled with their platform and technical architecture choices.
 

“One of the advantages of our platform approach using Microsoft technologies is Microsoft’s continual development of those technologies and the clear path they share with us,” states Steve Elsworthy. “The Microsoft AI Copilot capabilities are very exciting. That is absolutely something we will be looking to exploit within our chatbots on a case-by-case basis. There are safety considerations around it, but we feel confident in the work Microsoft has done in providing assurances for its responsible AI around the principles of transparency, trustworthiness, traceability and accountability.”
 

A platform for the future

In the contact centre, enthusiasm is high for the continual improvement of employee and the citizen experience. “I don’t think we’ve realised all the benefits yet,” says James Long. “That work is still ongoing. We’ve embarked on a transformation journey to continually improve the citizen experience.” 
 

“We’re still deploying and will continue to iterate moving forwards,” agrees Steve Elsworthy. “We are very interested in leveraging Microsoft’s responsible AI and the potential of Microsoft’s AI Copilot.” 
 

“We’re chasing nirvana,” Jenny Payne concludes, “We haven’t changed enough yet to make our citizens think ‘wow,’ but I am confident that with the continuing deployment of Microsoft Dynamics 365 as part of our journey we will get to the ‘wow’.”