Making resident services work end to end
A council website, contact centre, online forms, shared inboxes and case management systems can all work reasonably well individually while still creating a fragmented experience for residents and staff.
At Mid Sussex District Council, I am leading a transformation programme designed to tackle that problem across the whole resident journey: rebuilding the council’s digital front door, expanding a common approach to case management and testing where AI can remove avoidable work from high-volume customer services.
The aim isn’t simply to replace individual technologies. It is to create a set of common capabilities that can be reused across services and improved incrementally.
The challenge
Like many councils, Mid Sussex has accumulated different ways for residents to interact with services over time.
The website and online forms provide one route, telephone and email provide others, while the processes behind them vary considerably between services. Shared inboxes remain important operational tools and customer information can be distributed across different systems and teams.
This creates familiar problems: inconsistent customer journeys, duplicated handling, limited visibility of interactions and a tendency for individual service improvements to create another point solution.
The programme therefore needed to address both sides of the resident experience: how people contact the council and what happens after they do.
Rebuilding the digital front door
A central part of the programme is the complete rebuild of the council website using LocalGov Drupal.
Rather than treating this as a technical website replacement, we are using the rebuild to reconsider how residents find information, complete transactions and move between digital and assisted channels.
Priority content and customer journeys are being redesigned around resident needs, with accessibility and consistency built into the approach. Online forms are also being considered as part of the wider service journey rather than as standalone digital transactions.
LocalGov Drupal gives the council a platform built around common local government needs, while providing a foundation that can continue to evolve after the initial rebuild.
But manually redesigning every page and form creates another problem: scale.
A relatively small number of high-demand journeys justify significant research, design and editorial effort. Hundreds of lower-volume pages and forms do not.
That distinction has become one of the areas where we are exploring the practical application of AI.
Applying AI to real service problems
Rather than starting with a general ambition to “use AI”, we identified areas of existing customer contact where automation could potentially improve the experience or remove repetitive work.
Three pilots are particularly important.
AI voice agent
We have developed an AI voice agent for inbound telephone enquiries.
The agent uses approved council information to respond to straightforward enquiries, can provide residents with links to relevant online information and can transfer calls to an adviser when human support is required.
The objective isn’t to eliminate the telephone channel or prevent residents speaking to someone. It is to test whether routine enquiries can be resolved more quickly while releasing adviser capacity for calls where people genuinely need assistance.
Shared email triage
Shared mailboxes are another significant source of manual handling.
We are developing AI-assisted email triage that can interpret incoming messages, categorise them and route them appropriately, reducing the amount of staff time spent reading and manually sorting correspondence before any actual service work begins.
The approach is deliberately focused on triage rather than attempting to automate entire services. It provides a relatively controlled way to introduce AI into operational processes while retaining people where judgement or action is required.
Improving the long tail of content and forms
The website rebuild also creates an interesting scaling challenge.
The highest-value content and forms can receive direct attention from content designers and service specialists. Applying the same level of manual effort to the entire website would be expensive and slow.
We are therefore piloting the use of AI to review and improve the long tail of lower-volume content and forms, identifying issues such as readability, structure, accessibility and opportunities to simplify the resident journey.
This creates a tiered model: intensive human-led redesign where the potential benefit is greatest, supported by automated improvement across the much larger body of lower-demand content.
Scaling a common CRM model
Improving the front end only solves part of the problem.
The programme is also expanding the use of Salesforce as a common customer case-management platform.
This builds on an approach I have used in previous transformation programmes: avoid designing a bespoke CRM implementation for every service and instead establish a small number of standard patterns that can be adopted progressively.
One of those patterns is forms-to-case.
Where appropriate, an online interaction can create a standard case in Salesforce, providing a consistent record of the customer interaction and a starting point for workflow, integration or service-specific handling.
This does not mean every service has to undergo a major CRM transformation before it can benefit.
A service can initially receive a relatively simple case generated from a digital interaction. More sophisticated workflows, integrations and automation can then be introduced where there is sufficient value to justify them.
The intention is to make Salesforce progressively more useful as a council-wide capability without allowing the CRM itself to dictate how every service operates.
Building reusable capabilities
This incremental approach is important to the wider programme.
It would be possible to treat the new website, Salesforce, the voice agent, email triage and content automation as five separate technology projects. Doing so would risk recreating the fragmentation we are trying to remove.
Instead, we are developing common patterns and capabilities that can be reused across services.
That includes consistent approaches to case management, forms-to-case, system integration, AI services, data and architecture, alongside the governance needed to introduce new technologies safely.
The principle is straightforward: solve a problem once where possible, then make the solution easier for the next service to adopt.
It also changes the economics of transformation. Smaller services do not necessarily need their own substantial technology project. They can adopt an existing capability and concentrate effort on the parts of their service that are genuinely different.
Progress and outcomes
The programme is still in delivery, so it would be premature to present projected benefits as achieved results.
However, the foundations of the new model are now being put in place:
- the council website is being rebuilt on LocalGov Drupal, alongside the redesign of priority content and customer journeys;
- an AI voice agent has been developed for testing with real council content and customer scenarios;
- AI-assisted shared email triage is being developed as a reusable capability;
- automated approaches to improving lower-volume website content and forms are being explored;
- Salesforce is being expanded through common case-management and forms-to-case patterns; and
- integration, architecture and governance are being developed as shared programme capabilities rather than separately for each project.
The next measure of success is not simply whether each of these components goes live.
It is whether they begin to operate as a coherent service model: better digital journeys reducing unnecessary contact, AI handling appropriate repetitive tasks, and a common CRM approach giving staff a more consistent way to manage the interactions that remain.
That is the more significant transformation: moving from a collection of individual channels and systems towards a reusable set of capabilities for delivering resident services.