Ashford Borough Council is managing the physical flow of citizens using Qmatic customer flow management (CFM) technology in its new consolidated community services hub, known as the Ashford Gateway Hub Plus.
The hub comprises many community services under one roof including: library and archives; registration of births, deaths and marriages; adult education; skills plus; housing; Ashford Day Opportunity Centre: health services and a social enterprise café, Food with Friends.
There are also more than 50 flexible partners, predominantly charities and voluntary sector organisations, such as Citizens Advice and Shelter that work from the hub. Customer Flow Management systems handle 35,000 customers a month.
Qmatic’s CFM includes: touch screen vision kiosks; ticket printers at reception; visual displays to support customer flow and self-service, as well as integrated software to support back-office customer flow tracking, monitoring and reporting.
Based in Ashford’s Town Centre, Qmatic’s system provides smooth customer flow between various council services and is currently handling at least 35,000 customers a month. A total of 10 interview rooms and eight booths are linked to the Qmatic system.
There is a self-serve kiosk where people who have booked appointments can book themselves in through touchscreen technology and four large plasma screens on each floor show the status of customer queues for services and also call people visually to appointments.
Julie Rogers, Strategic Customer Service Manager at Ashford Borough Council commented:
“It was critical that services within the building matched community needs. We wanted a system that would enable us to journey map customer behaviour; to track what happens when a customer travels through the Gateway, whether they saw one service or a number of services, so that we could see how services linked and where cross referrals were taking place. Qmatic’s system allows us to do this.”
David Anahory, CEO of Qmatic UK added:
“We worked closely with Ashford Borough Council to assess their needs, find out about typical service pain points and to understand how Kent citizens access community services. This involved a knowledge workshop, which included all the partners involved in the project. The result is a flexible system, which encourages customers to, self-serve, navigate through the various services on offer and provides continuity between customer flow and the number of staff available. Flexibility in the system means that community partners can be added and removed and it can be customised to include other administrative functions such as room and equipment booking.”
Indications are that the system is very intuitive for citizens to use and has been well received. The latest customer satisfaction survey reported just under 94% overall customer satisfaction and customers said they were happy they could get to where they needed to be.
You can hear more about the customer flow at Ashford Borough Council at a dedicated event with Qmatic on 6th September 2012. See http://www.qmaticsolutions.co.uk/events/ for further information.
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