Saving Money and Improving Business Processes - Local Authority
Virtual Mail Room has enabled Ashford Borough Council to improve its business processes and make significant savings on the management of its outgoing Council Tax & Benefit notifications.
Within its jurisdiction Ashford Borough Council has 50,000 council tax households and about 10,000 Benefit claimants, a figure which has grown significantly in recent years, mostly as a result of the difficult economic climate.
The Revenues and Benefits team is responsible for Council Tax and Business Rate collections, Benefits notifications and also matters relating to sundry debtors.
Q: How has using Virtual Mail Room enabled Ashford Borough Council to improve its business processes and make savings on the management of its outgoing Council Tax & Benefit notifications
A: Virtual Mail Room’s expertly managed communication services including Hybrid Mail, SMS, Email and standard tracked post enable its clients to deliver the right information, in the right format, to the right person, at the right time; securely, audited and at significantly reduced cost of the traditional methods, with low start-up costs and no minimum commitment.
Q: Why would a local authority work with Virtual Mail Room?
A: Peter Purcell, Revenues and Benefits Manager, describes how the Council started working with Virtual Mail Room (VMR):
“We had previously made a significant investment in implementing a licensed software solution to reduce Council Tax and Benefits paperwork and also the general administration overheads in this area. We had also made savings in staffing numbers in order to resource this investment on the assumption we would be able to manage our processes more efficiently via this in-house electronic and online capability.
As it turned out, this software purchase based strategy was not as effective as we had hoped, so, when we heard about VMR and its outsourced services, we were interested to see how it could offer an alternative way for us to achieve our goal of reducing the office workload but also maintain or actually increase the quality of service that we could provide to borough residents, even with the reduced number of staff now available.”
Q: What benefits have you seen from using Virtual Mail Room to manage your Council Tax and Benefit mail notifications.
A: Time, effort, costs and accuracy, “like clockwork!”
Peter adds: “We started with a six month trial with VMR in mid 2010 but then, in order to comply with our financial regulations, we had to put the contract for this work formally out to tender in the autumn. VMR won the tender and now sends out on a daily basis all our Council Tax bills and Benefit notifications, which amounts to about 4,000 bills plus notifications relating to over 2,000 claims per month.
Where appropriate, and as part of its standard service, VMR will merge these and add enclosures, like direct debit forms, register of elector forms for new properties and change of circumstance notices. This saves us all the time and effort it would take us to do this manually ourselves, and probably more accurately.
We provide VMR with the relevant data in overnight batches via an easy to use but secure file transfer system. This was straightforward and quick to set up, does not interfere with or disrupt our other processes and, to be honest, just runs like clockwork!
“VMR also manages our annual Council Tax billing for us, but it is on the ongoing, day to day billing and notifications where VMR has taken the bulk of our daily admin work away; we save the equivalent of four days of a member of staff’s time per week as a direct result of outsourcing this work to VMR. We are also no longer incurring paper, envelope and printing costs as we used to. The processing accuracy, reporting, and reduced staff time that we gain by using VMR save us about £15,000 per annum.”
Q: Along with providing a service that delivers accuracy and runs like clockwork, what other benefits have you seen from using the Virtual Mail Room?
A: Peter continues “In addition, our most recent post-delivery contractor had been taking up to ten days to deliver a second class item. Now VMR has reduced this timescale to between 2 -4 days, (which is what it had been before). This has removed the need for us to deal with the many telephone calls we used to receive from people enquiring about this correspondence, and the consequent time and effort it took us to send out duplicates to them, which we often felt we had to do.
As a matter of course VMR also supplies certificates of posting for our 50,000 annual Council Tax billing and this proof is an important requirement for us. “
Q: How has the Virtual Mail Room been able to support transition to e-billing?
A: “One of the reasons we went with VMR was to be able to offer Council Tax ‘e-billing‘ and ‘e-delivery’ on Benefits. Whilst at the time we started working with VMR this was still generally a future rather than a current requirement, it was reassuring for us to know that, when the time came for us to provide these kinds of electronic delivery options, we would be able to manage the take up easily and effectively with VMR without incurring capital expenditure costs on new software, as this capability is already built into its flexible delivery service. Since then, VMR has worked with us to deploy an on-line e-billing sign up service from which we have converted thousands of residents to e-billing, saving the council time and money as well as increasing collections. In addition, we now also use SMS alerts via VMR to send pre-reminders for unpaid bills which has seen a significant reduction in the number of paper or email reminders we have to send each month. Again, this solution has boosted collection rates.
Q: Would you recommend other Local Authorities to use Virtual Mail Room?
“I am sure every Council would say that it manages its Council Tax billing and Benefits notifications in different ways. However, I’m also confident that many could benefit, as we have, from outsourcing some of these key business processes to a specialist like VMR, whether or not they have already tried to automate some of these procedures, either by developing new in house systems themselves or licensing third party software products.
This is particularly the case in the current economic climate, when councils are under increased pressure to make additional savings, and the benefits could be even more significant for councils sharing services and looking to achieve greater economies of scale.”
“VMR is a reliable and responsive supplier and we are always interested to hear how VMR could help Ashford introduce faster, cheaper and better business processes.”
“I continue to be impressed with VMR's commitment to finding solutions.”
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
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