Trafford Council

“Capscan not only enables access to our master data in a way we’ve never been able to before but also benefits the organisation as a whole by reducing service delivery errors and helping to ensure those services are of a high quality and speedily executed.”

CRM Development & Support Officer at Trafford Council, David Aspinall

The Challenge

An increasing amount of pressure is being laid on the public sector to improve the quality of service it delivers to its citizens. Many local authorities are starting to think about individuals and organisations as customers, with needs, wants and expectations about the service they receive. Based in South Manchester, Trafford Council is responsible for the provision of local government services to an area that covers around 40 square miles.

An individual or organisation may need to contact Trafford Council for a number of reasons, from calling the Trafford Direct customer service staff for social care services for an elderly relative, or contacting the waste and recycling department to change the address where an organisation is billed. The details for each of these interactions are ultimately recorded onto its database within the mySAP™ Business Suite CRM module with the SAP™ Social Care industry solution, which is used to manage the administration and delivery of adult/children’s social care, waste & recycling and environmental services.

Address data for 98,000 properties and 12,000 locations within the borough is held within the CRM module. This data is based and maintained according to Trafford Council’s Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG), a database created by the council containing high-quality references that define locations and addresses. The address relating to the enquiry is essential, as each of the 232,000 citizen and 7,500 business customer records, both within and outside of the borough, must be linked to at least one property. However, some council services are only available to citizens and organisations within the borough, but with no way for staff to ascertain this when creating new citizen records (especially those with limited knowledge of the area), the CRM address data based on the LLPG was becoming corrupted.

“We were not maximising the benefits that the LLPG-based data could offer us, in particular delivering the best possible quality customer service – starting with the quality of our databases,” says CRM Development & Support Officer at Trafford Council, David Aspinall. “Previously, when staff searched the CRM address data to identify the property in question, there was absolutely no error tolerance for missing information and misspellings. New property records were being added to the CRM address database in the belief that the property was either not in the database or external to the borough. This was prevalent for addresses with more than one name, for example Friars Court, Sibson Road in Sale is also number 66, Sibson Road, Sale. As a result we were experiencing duplicate property records being created daily in CRM, completely compromising its integrity.”

“The day-to-day maintenance of records became labour intensive,” adds Aspinall. “At a minimum we ran the risk of delays in service processing and even delivery failures by sending staff and third party contractors to an incorrect address, the worse case scenario was the provision of service to a property outside the authority’s boundary, creating unnecessary work and costs.”

Trafford Council also receives services requests that are external to the borough, subsequently the council experienced problems with staff creating external addresses in CRM in the belief that they were in the borough. Aspinall explains, “The majority of the town of Sale, is situated within Trafford, so staff associate the town name as Trafford. However the town has outlying localities external to Trafford, for which services could be processed and we might not be responsible.

The Solution

Trafford Council approached Capscan, a leading provider of address management software and data integrity services, to tackle these issues, with a strong focus on overhauling the way services were processed and delivered by leveraging the potential of LLPG-based data in mySAP™ CRM. “Capscan has extensive experience of data quality,” says Aspinall. “The technical team provided us with a flexible Software Developer’s Kit (SDK) and a customisable Application Programming Interface (API) so our own IT department could create the interface between its technology and mySAP™ CR. The technical team was present on site for one day of Matchcode Data Capture consultation for cascading knowledge to our developers, which helped to shorten the time needed to integrate the software. Once the CRM and Matchcode Data Capture preparation works had been carried out, integration into the CRM user interface took just three days to complete.”

Capscan provided Trafford Council with data quality products and services including its deduplication tool; mail for mySAP™ Business Suite (developed by its strategic partner, Uniserv), address data validation software Matchcode Data Capture and a range of enhanced datasets including Ward and Local Health Authority codes.

Certified for mySAP™ CRM, mail enables staff at Trafford Council to prevent duplicates in the address and customer databases using automatically initiated checks and matching operations for new records or alterations. Specially adapted techniques for incomplete or incorrect information produces results with close matches, obtaining a high quality result.

When creating new customer records today, mySAP™ CRM users at Trafford Council are able to use mail to search for customers or property addresses and find possible matches already on mySAPTM CRM. As a result, there is a significantly higher chance that properties within the borough are found within the LLPG-based address data, something that was not possible previously. If it is not found, it is more likely to be an external address, prompting the user to decide that a new record is required.

Once the record creation process begins, Matchcode Data Capture works alongside mail as an extra quality check, using the Ward codes to determine whether the entered address is within Trafford or not. Using Capscan’s SDK, Trafford Council’s IT department has programmed Matchcode Data Capture to display alert messages to the user; if Matchcode Data Capture identifies that a requested address is within Trafford, creation is not permitted. If it identifies it as being external, the user is informed and required to confirm this before creation can occur. New property records and subsequent customer records are automatically appended an ‘in borough’ or ‘out borough’ tag. This allows Trafford Council to automatically alert CRM users when they may be about to supply a service to a customer for which Trafford Council is not responsible.

“This function was for situations such as customers living on the authority’s boundary, as it would immediately confirm to staff whether borough-only services can be processed for that property or customer,” explains Aspinall.

The Benefits

Using Capscan’s technology within mySAP™ CRM has benefited Trafford Council’s service delivery, as Aspinall explains, “It not only enables access to our master data in a way we’ve never been able to before but also benefits the organisation as a whole by reducing service delivery errors and helping to ensure those services are of a high quality and speedily executed. We can be confident that our staff and contractors are being sent to the right location, or that important postal correspondence is correctly addressed. The error tolerance provided by mail ensures that the LLPG-based data in CRM is maintained and governed to the highest possible standard, critically reducing the risk of duplicate records and incorrect entries into the customer database.”

Trafford Council has also saved in terms of staff labour time and cost. “To rectify the previous problems caused by the daily duplication of our LLPG-based data we would have at least needed to dedicate a full time member of staff,” says Aspinall. “In addition, services that the Council is not responsible for can also now be referred to the correct governing body, by using the Ward codes. For example the One Stop Resource Centre, which the Trafford NHS Primary Health Care Trust operates in partnership with Council, has access to the mySAPTM CRM module. So if a health service client requires Trafford Social Care Services, they access the CRM module where the external citizens and addresses are alerted and clients can be referred to the correct governing body.”