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Community Gateway Association transforms customer service with EDM, workflow and contact management from Civica

Not-for-profit housing association aims to automate document management, increase staff efficiency and reduce costs with Civica software.

Community Gateway Association (CGA) plans to improve its customer service with an integrated electronic document management (EDM), workflow and contact management system from Civica - a market leader in specialist systems and outsourcing services that help organisations improve service delivery and efficiency.

An existing Civica customer, CGA is a not-for-profit community business set up to meet the housing needs of people in Preston and its surrounding areas. The association selected EDM, contact management and workflow from Civica following a competitive tender process to increase staff efficiency and reduce costs.

The Civica solution is fully integrated and enables information captured via multiple methods to be processed in the same way using standardised workflow. For example, a customer may request a service from a member of staff working remotely using mobile devices, via the contact centre, through a web service or by sending a letter or e-mail. All enquiries can be dealt with consistently and in line with published standards regardless of the customer’s preferred method of contact.

The key benefits of Civica’s EDM and workflow are:

• Improved customer service – contact management will enable CGA to deliver more consistent and responsive services to all customers.
• Staff efficiency and streamlined workflow – organisations such as CGA spend significant amounts of time filing and retrieving paper documents. Studies have shown that a typical organisation spends eight hours per person per week on filing. EDM and workflow.
• improves business processes and staff productivity, freeing up staff to spend more time on frontline services.
• Space saving – CGA’s offices were at full capacity and office space at a premium, the ability to condense filing cabinets into their IT infrastructure will free up much needed space.
• Document risk minimisation – EDM will ensure CGA’s files are never at risk from fire, flood or other disaster.
• In addition, CGA will use Civica’s MyService solution to provide self-service customer access to housing services and information via the web. This supports CGA’s strategy to empower tenants, reducing reliance on the contact centre and offering a more flexible service.

CGA has recently achieved the Government’s Customer Service Excellence standard, in recognition of its drive for continuous customer service improvement. The organisation selected Civica to deliver flexible systems enabling CGA to adapt to change and new ways of working, and to embrace cutting edge technology to further enhance the services for all their customers, both internal and external.

Phil McCabe, Head of Finance, Community Gateway Association, said: “The customer is at the heart of everything that we do and we want to give our residents the best possible service. Initially CGA looked at the concept of digitally archiving all the documents held within some specific departments, but in reality the benefits of encompassing workflow and CRM are more wide-reaching, not only within those departments but across the whole organisation.”