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Serco Customer Services How intelligent automation is helping Local Government transform public services

Supporting citizens and delivering value for money 

Delivering high quality services and meeting the changing needs of citizens while dealing with budget constraints is a challenge councils up and down the country are facing on a daily basis. In fact, research by the Institute for Government shows that Local Authorities have seen a decline in spending power of 16% over the last decade. 

For Lincolnshire County Council innovation has been the key to meeting this challenge head on. Tech-enabled support from Serco has enabled it to provide value for money, make business improvements, and deliver flexible support services – transforming public services across the region. 

People working in a call centre

Key strategic partner  

Serco has been operating the Council’s Customer Service Centre (CSC) since 2015. The Customer Services Centre provides a vital 24/7 social care service for 365 days of the year.

This includes the processing and assessment of referrals to Lincolnshire County Council children’s safeguarding team.  

Following a robust assessment process for each referral, the resulting outcome is documented, and an outcome letter produced and sent to the relevant parties. 
 

Reducing inefficiency

Councils like Lincolnshire deal with a large number of contacts each year and produce thousands of letters.

The Serco team identified that generating children’s outcome letters following referrals was a resource intensive process which needed to be managed everyday by an employee, taking them away from important case work. 

As the number of contacts increased, so did the number of outcome letters, diverting valuable resources from frontline work. 
 
Man sat at a computer, wearing a telephone headset in a call centre

We were initially sceptical that automation could solve our problems and might create more work than it would save. However, we’ve come to really value our new co-worker which has freed up a lot of resources, enabling us to work faster and more efficiently than before, improving our case output, and ultimately improving the service to clients.

Lincolnshire County Council

Automation in social care

Councils like Lincolnshire are increasingly looking at new and innovative ways to provide services and Serco was able to provide the solution. Recognising the process could be automated, Serco utilised automation platform UiPath to train a ‘virtual worker’ to produce the outcome letters.
Male and female call centre employees looking at a computer screen. The man is pointing at the screen.
Initial trials led to 50% of the letters being produced by the virtual worker with that figure rising to over 85% following the second development stage.

The automation has resulted in over 900 outcome letters being generated per month, with the time saving of one FTE given back to the team. The virtual worker is able to deal with outcome letter requests for 14 hours a day. It doesn’t take time off for holidays or illness and could work 24/7 if needed to deliver a consistent service.

Despite initial scepticism, the virtual worker has become a valued member of the team and the council is already looking at similar processes which could benefit from automation.
 

Delivering innovation and continuous improvement

Sara Johnson, Head of Local Government Customer Services said: “Part of Serco’s offer is a strong commitment to delivering continuous improvement within our contract operations to provide best value for money for our customers. 

“The team was able to proactively identify an opportunity to improve process efficiency for the children’s safeguarding contact service at Lincolnshire County Council.”
Due to the sensitive nature of children’s social care work, it was critical to ensure accurate production of letters and eliminate any potential for errors, to maintain high levels of data security and prevent data breaches.

In order to achieve this a comprehensive data protection impact assessment was carried out to understand how the platform engages with the data and identify and mitigate any potential risks.

The automation project has enabled staff to be more efficient and has freed up time for them to focus on more complex and value-added work for the citizens of Lincolnshire.
 
Female and male call centre employees sat at a desk in front of computer screens talking
Female call centre operative

Get in touch

Interested in finding out how Serco tech-enabled solutions could help your organisation? Contact Sandy Jethwa, Business Development Manager for Serco Citizen Services.

Email Sandy