City of Port Phillip: Saving Weeks Annually With 2-Way API Integration

Highlights

1. The City of Port Phillip saved 23 business days annually in processing end-to-end integration with Snap Send Solve and Technology One.
2. Updates in the CRM are instantly communicated to the resident via Snap Send Solve, keeping them engaged throughout the process.
3. Customers report a reduction in the time it takes to solve issues, improving public trust and perception of the City of Port Phillip.

The Challenge

Before integration, manual processing of those 22,384 reports took up to three minutes each, with the typical reporter submitting an average of 5.9 reports annually.

A third of the reports received were dumped rubbish. If they were manually processed, it would take up to 408 hours.

Every time a community member interacts with the council they’re manually assigned a Name and Address Record (NAR) by staff. If they use different contact details for any reason, it can result in duplicate entries, which need to be manually merged later.

Double handling between Snap Send Solve and the internal CRM was also introducing human error. Once each report was logged, any updates would need to be entered into both Snap Send Solve and the CRM.

Dumped rubbish reports have a two-business-day turnaround from the report being logged until removal. Previously, if a report was submitted on Friday it might not be allocated to the right team and workflow for action until Monday, pushing any action taken to Wednesday.

As each report needed to be manually processed, more reports meant more time entering information into the CRM. With a 25% increase in reports in 2022, the City of Port Phillip needed to increase efficiency to stay on top of issues.

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The Solution

The solution needed to allow the City of Port Phillip to scale its engagement with citizens without impacting response times, customer satisfaction, and engagement.

So the City of Port Phillip spearheaded the first-ever Snap Send Solve integration with Technology One to automate report processing. Most of the work to enable this integration was performed by Snap Send Solve and Technology One. For TechnologyOne CI Anywhere customers, this can be easily replicated now via the Snap Send Solve connector.

To address the issue of duplicate names, after the initial report, customers are matched with a NAR in the council’s CRM. Every following report, the community member’s NAR is automatically linked to provide a single customer record, saving the council’s team time and increasing accuracy.

Any updates made by City of Port Phillip staff in their CRM are instantly communicated to the community member via Snap Send Solve. From our data, in-app updates are more likely to result in higher customer satisfaction and keep citizens engaged in local matters.

Because of this integration, there’s no need to manually action the requests by City of Port Phillip’s Customer Service team at all. When using Snap Send Solve to make a report, users in the City of Port Phillip answer a few additional questions, which means a work order is automatically created. With the integration running, this happens immediately after the report is sent.

This means if a dumped rubbish report is received via Snap Send Solve, the request immediately creates a work order in Technology One and gets pushed to the relevant work crew for action. This is especially impactful for City of Port Phillip residents for requests such as illegally parked vehicles - getting the request where it needs to go faster than ever before.

“We’re really keen to promote any channel that makes it easy for customers to communicate with us. We want to continue to promote the use of Snap Send Solve because it is so easy,” says Melanie Darmanin, Head of Customer and Business Improvement, City of Port Phillip.

As the usage of Snap Send Solve grows in the community the time-saving and efficiency scales now the system is integrated.

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