Address Data at Heart of NE Derbyshire’s Award Winning Public Service Project

Up to date and accurate address records are at the heart of an award winning Customer Service project from North East Derbyshire District Council. ‘Connect North East’ was recognised with the presentation of the “Transforming Public Services Achievement of the Year Award’ at the 2007 Municipal Journal Achievement Awards in London. The project, which has led to a remarkable transformation in service performance and significant efficiency savings, uses the Council’s property database within their Customer Contact and Service Centres to identify the exact address of a caller or to map the location of an incident. North East Derbyshire District Council’s centralised address database forms part of a national addressing initiative, the National Land and Property Gazetteer, and is assisting officers throughout the Council with the day-to-day delivery of frontline services.

The ‘Connect North East’ project was driven by North East Derbyshire District Council’s published priority “Building an Excellent Council”, which forms part of the Council’s Corporate Plan and aims to ensure improved access and streamlined delivery of services to customers. The two-phase project included a multi channel Customer Contact Centre with state of the art communication technology, sophisticated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and specially trained staff. The Council has also made important changes to the reception areas and front office staff are trained to deal with a wide range issues without the need to refer residents to other departments.

“Accurate address records that are regularly updated and maintained to a high quality have helped this project achieve significant and measurable efficiency savings,” said Hilary Jones, Director of Customers and Communities at North East Derbyshire District Council. “The improved service quality has installed greater confidence and this in turn has led to a rising call volume yet call waiting times have been slashed, abandoned call rates have fallen and 91% of all queries are resolved at the first point of contact.”

North East Derbyshire District Council’s Land and Property Gazetteer was originally created from a combination of back office datasets, including Council Tax, Electoral Register and Non- Domestic Rates, in order to create a unique reference for every property and land parcel within the district. The combined data was cleansed to remove duplication and then other accuracies were addressed, such as the relative positional accuracy of each record. Containing more than 50,000 individual records the gazetteer is centrally maintained and has been integrated with the majority of service areas. The LLPG is available to all officers through a dynamic link on the authority’s Intranet ‘NEDi’ and via the Council’s Geographical Information System (GIS). The data is also used to power North East Derbyshire Maps an online mapping facility on the Council’s website

“It is an honour to receive this award on behalf of the Council,” continued Hilary Jones. “It is a tribute to the hard work, skill and dedication of the Customer Services Team, a recognition of the remarkable transformation in service standards and an acknowledgement for the IT infrastructure and essential council databases that underpin the whole project.”