Innovative digital solution provides increased capacity in the Debtors Team.

• Do you wish your team could spend more time with your clients or on creative, innovative tasks ?
• Are monotonous repetitive tasks taking up your skilled workers time?  

If so read on to find out how the Debtors team have transformed their ways of working saving time and reducing the need for skilled staff to undertake monotonous tasks. 

The problem #1

The council issues over 50 thousand invoices a year for over £80 million of income. Due to the high number of low level debts with only 4.5 FTE the team has been struggling to
actively recover smaller outstanding sums. Recruiting more officers wasn’t an option – they needed to transform their ways of working, to think and work differently to create more capacity.

Starting with the customer

The team identified a cohort of customers where there was a high volume of low value invoices. They took time to focus on their customers to understand the barriers to payment – They found often it’s not that people don’t want to pay but that they find the process hard or confusing or that they forget, this is particularly important for some of our older customers who struggle with or don’t want to use online solutions. 

The solution #1

Move customers to Direct debit – Set up the payment once – Send 1 invoice a year instead of 12 and advise them when the payment will be taken each month without the customer having to remember and take action to pay. 

The problem #2

The solution to problem #1 created even more manual processing work. The process to create a Direct Debit for a Delta Wellbeing life line customer required the involvement of Delta Engineers, Delta business support and the Debtors team to take information from customer visits and calls, forms, emails and spreadsheets before inputting into the Unit 4 Agresso system to generate invoices, direct debit mandates and payments.  The information is all needed but the processes were laborious and time consuming often taking several days from the initial visit with the customer to the completion of the DD.

The solution #2

Working with the Digital Solutions team. The process was mapped and understood and streamlined. A new digital form was created and  a new digital team member the Debtors Bot was introduced.
Now the Engineer visits the customer takes all relevant information in the first visit inputs this into the digital form whilst still with the customer. Within 5 minutes the Bot has picked up and read the form, checked Agresso for the customer, set up a new customer if needed, set up the Direct debit on the System and generated the invoice.  The customer frustration is gone, the repetitive inputting of information is handled robotically, and the Delta and Debtors team have more capacity to undertake other work.  

Within the debtors team alone this has saved 450hours of work a year which can now be focused on value adding income collection activities.  The cost of the digital team member is £2000 per year in comparison to paying and additional staff member to do this work at a cost of £7000.
What’s even better – the digital worker can be trained to do more than 1 task and can operate 24 hours a day so has the potential to remove 8760 hours of work from the current work load providing the equivalent of 4 extra Staff which would have cost the department £123,000 a year. 

• Do you wish your team could spend more time with your clients or on creative, innovative tasks ?
• Are monotonous repetitive tasks taking up your skilled workers time?  

 Don’t struggle on – explore the support a Digital team member can offer to you. Contact Mark Howard -Senior Transformation and Change officer on Teams or on 07814 476097.