Improved Debt Recovery for Great Yarmouth Borough Council
A local government district with borough status, Great Yarmouth Borough Council has 45,000 council tax households and about 4,500 people liable to pay business rates within its jurisdiction.
The Recovery Team at Great Yarmouth is responsible for collecting payments from defaulting Council Tax or Business Rates customers, a process which effectively starts when the Recovery Team receives a list of Liability Orders granted by the magistrates’ court, where previous reminders from the Council have not resulted in sufficient payment being made.
Before Virtual Mail Room
Great Yarmouth Borough Council wanted to make significant savings & improve collection rates on Council Tax & Business Rate recovery. James Wedon, the Recovery Team Manager at the time, described how manual and time consuming the process was before working with Virtual Mail Room (VMR):
Before VMR: "We have an ongoing need to send out reminders, cancellation notices to customers, summonses and liability orders, usually a few hundred at a time. We used to manage this ourselves via a completely manual in-house process that I’m sure is probably typical for a lot of local authorities. The documents would all be printed internally, which takes a considerable amount of time, then all the paperwork would have to be folded and inserted in envelopes ready for posting. To do this, we had to take all of our team off case processing work for about two days every week. This meant we weren't able to get on with the core recovery process of actually going through the cases and dealing with the customers."
With VMR: "Virtual Mail Room now handles all of our reminder and recovery communications including Summonses. As far as we are concerned, the process is both simple and secure; we run a report on our own computer system to establish who hasn’t paid and from that report we generate a data file of names, addresses and amounts outstanding that we upload via a secure web interface to VMR for them to process the notifications."
Complete data security and legal compliance
"With security of personal data being the top priority, we had to ensure that the VMR's service adhered to our increasingly stringent data security policies. Amongst other safeguards, we receive an automated email from VMR confirming safe receipt of each encrypted data file by return.
To comply with the magistrates’ court and in order to be granted a Liability Order against a council tax or a business rate defaulter we have to be able to prove that we have sent the appropriate notices. As part of VMR's automated process we are provided with a Proof of Postage Certificate, which we can then produce in court if required. Being able to simply upload a data file and then automatically receive Proof of Postage Certificates a few days later is a valuable saving of time and effort.
Virtual Mail Room also ensures that the Council complies with any essential legal requirements by inserting the necessary additional regulatory and other documentation with the Liability Orders."
The Benefits: Saving time, collecting more debt and improving staff job satisfaction
Great Yarmouth has been using VMR’s services since 2006. According to James Wedon: "The Council now saves between six and eight days of five staff members’ time every month as a direct result of using Virtual Mail Room. This is a huge saving and outsourcing our bulk communications to VMR has also given my team the freedom to concentrate on collecting the money, which is after all our main role.
Staff job satisfaction has been transformed as their time is now more constructively spent on front line recovery with the inevitable positive result that more money is collected more quickly and efficiently. Using VMR’s services simply helps me to get the most out of my team."
Get in touch
Email Tina Moloney - tmoloney@vmailroom.co.uk
Email Mickel Bak - mbak@vmailroom.co.uk
Or call us on +44 (0)20 8898 6565
Read other Virtual Mailroom Case studies:
Hybrid Mail Makes Homeworkers More Effective
Hybrid Mail for Offshore Teams Improves Efficiency
Better Debt Recovery Rates for Councils