Shepway District Council in Kent has increased the use
of online services and cut customer query response times after
installing an
open source payments processing engine.
The council deployed the open source cash receipting application
to process customer payments coming from its contact centre and its
website.
The application links to a customer relationship management
(CRM) system for payments coming through the contact centre. For
payments via the website, the application links to the Government
Gateway portal to authenticate individuals.
Shepway District Council said, "The result was that, just over
six months after installation, residents of Shepway are using the
internet to pay for services including council tax, business rates,
housing benefit overpayments, parking fines, rents and sundry
debts. Nearly 1,000 payments were processed online during the first
six months."
The volume of calls to the contact centre fell by 20% during the
same period.
Council chiefs were able to save an estimated £2,700 by using
the reduction in call volumes to speed up the remaining customer
queries.
The council is installing a second version of the payment
processing application, which runs on a Sun AG DIS box, that will
process payments made through its planning portal.
Alongside the customer-facing system, the council installed an
intranet that council employees can use to transact payments.
Shepway District Council joins three much larger councils -
Birmingham,
Bristol and Cheshire - in the select group of local authorities
that have successfully implemented open source software.
The councils that have installed open source systems set up an
online forum called the
Open Source Academy to share best practice throughout local
government.
Each local authority in the Open Source Academy has implemented
different applications.
Cheshire County Council used open source software to replace
Windows 98 when Microsoft withdrew support for the operating
system. The county council decided that keeping the old Windows 98
devices with an open source client would be cheaper than upgrading
to a later version of Windows.
Bristol City Council installed Star Office (the open source
alternative to Microsoft Office) on more than 200 computers.
Birmingham City Council implemented the Open Office productivity
suite in its public libraries.
Open source
advice site launched >>
Councils' Open
Source Academy >>
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