THE OBJECTIVE

North Yorkshire Police (NYP) extended the use of the existing customer contact management system, Aspire, which had previously been utilised in the Force Control Room (FCR), across all Front Counters.

The main aim and objective of the roll out was to more fully support Front Counter staff in providing an improved customer service when a member of the public presents themselves at a Police Station Front Counter. By providing the Front Counter staff with an appropriate mechanism for capturing / recording customer contact details and requests for service, it makes it possible for the organisation to provide a tailored, co-ordinated response to customer enquiries; working closely with colleagues within the FCR and Uniformed Operations.

Whilst Aspire was already utilised within the FCR to capture calls for service, the Front Counter staff are now able to add to the customer contact database by capturing and recording face to face contacts with members of the public. The implementation of the
software is also supporting an increasingly accurate understanding of the footfall NYP receives through provision of the Front Counter service.

SERVICE REQUESTS

Whilst the Front Counter staff are contributing significantly to building up customer profiles within the Aspire database in terms of service requests, they also deal with members of the public wishing to report an incident. On average 650 incidents a month are reported via the Front Counters. This figure is significantly larger than had been estimated prior to the Aspire implementation. Recording an incident is completed by creating a service request within Aspire  which is auto populated by data from the customer contact record and populated with incident details. There is a check box on the form to indicate where a customer is waiting in the front office for an officer to attend.

Implementation of Aspire across the Front Counters began in March 2014 and by August 2014 all Front Counter staff had been fully trained and the new system, and supporting business processes, were live across the county. Since the implementation began, 45,000 new contacts with members of the public have been recorded on Aspire which can now provide the Force with historical contact details should any of those 45,000 people contact
the Force again.

As well as new contacts Aspire records updated contacts allowing staff to recognise and maintain a repeat caller’s matrix together to support the early identification of vulnerability that then enables a consistent and faster response, this is especially important for the smaller and more remote Front Counters.

BENEFITS

The business benefits detailed in the initial change proposal are already being realised by North Yorkshire Police. These can be evidenced from the performance data and feedback from the practitioners and managers within both the FCR and Front Counters.

• The increased knowledge of a customer’s profile available through Aspire® is leading to an improved customer experience, increased speed of service and a more informed and customer-focused response to enquiries.
• The communication and relationship between the Front Counter teams and the FCR has improved, with incidents now largely being recorded in a timely fashion and allocated accordingly and our customers are being kept up to date throughout the process.
• The input speed within the Front Counter teams has improved, double keying of incident reports has stopped and access to a summary of a customer’s previous contacts has proven invaluable.

Aspire enables a customer focussed process for Front Counters interactions by focusing on the needs of the customer. This is achieved through accurate, appropriate and prompt data capture, processing, and enquiry resolution. Early benefits identified through the York and Scarborough trials are:

• Early risk identification, moved the validation of nominal to the front of the process.
• Early identification has enabled identification of vulnerable or marked people and repeat victims.
• Early resolution of customer enquiry reducing number of touch points (resolution at first point of contact).
• Reduced waiting time for the public.
• Improved service provision to the public without added internal process time.

Process Improvements enabled through the Aspire implementation include:

• Elimination of duplicated data entry.
• Reduction of duplicated incidents.
• Problem resolution at first point of contact.
• Improved access to historical victim and incident data.
• Accountability through creation of SLA bound response and audit capability.
• Improved accuracy of data recording.
• Increased speed and reduced failure demand going into the FCR.
• All contact points using the same process on one systems providing clarity as to which stage of the process is being undertaken and identifying any delays.
• Ability to monitor and manage demand through the front office and assign appropriately skilled staff.

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