Sevenoaks District Council is within a Green Belt area of West Kent. It covers an area of 142 square miles. The main towns that make up the District are Sevenoaks, Edenbridge, and Swanley as well as several small villages. The Council employs 400 members of staff.

The Challenge
Sevenoaks needed a more efficient way of recording council visitors. The Council had a service standard to meet that 75% of all visitors to the Council’s reception should be seen within 5 minutes.

When delivering this level of service, Sevenoaks faced certain efficiency problems:-

• More efficient system required to manage visitors
• Paper based reports lacked accuracy

All visitors to Sevenoaks’ reception were required to manually sign a form. A great deal of administrative time was being taken up in collating paperwork and generating reports. The accuracy of these reports was affected because forms not signed by visitors had to be discarded. The Council decided that to increase efficiency, cut down on stationery costs, and improve accuracy of reports; an automated system would be more cost effective.

Having decided that an automated system would be beneficial, the Council decided to look at the Queue Management Software options available in the market. They were quoted £20,000 for a solution.

The Result
After looking at the software options available, and taking into consideration the costs involved, Sevenoaks decided to create a new application themselves, using their existing intranet. The Customer Queue System (CQS) intranet application was then developed.

Accessibility checks were made to ensure that CQS is compliant for people with visual impairments.

The system works as follows:-

• A visitor enters the reception area
• A touch screen tablet PC is used in reception
• The system informs the relevant department
• The visitor is allocated a number
• TV screen displays the number being seen

With the system now in place, Sevenoaks are enjoying the following benefits and efficiencies:-

• Visitors are now seen in a timely manner.
• An improved user experience for council visitors
• All reports are now automated
• The applications have saved the taxpayer £20,000

The new queuing system has made Sevenoaks look more professional, improving customer service and transforming the way they deal with reception customers. With the new automated system, visitors can see exactly where they are in the queuing system. As all visitors to Sevenoaks are recorded electronically, reports that are generated to measure the number of council visitors are now 100% accurate. The Council is now better able to measure their performance against the five minute service standard and aim to improve on this.

Chris Orton, IT Service Coordinator at Sevenoaks said,
“by developing our own reception system using our existing intranet, the council have increased efficiency and saved ourselves a considerable amount of money. We now have a solution that helps us to meet our service standards”.

Sevenoaks have successfully created an application specific to their own business needs using the SORCE platform. By creating this application themselves they have not only made a huge initial saving but by introducing an automated reception system, they have significantly reduced administrative time and costs. They are now able to accurately measure council visitor figures and by doing this meet and aim to exceed their service standards.