DLUHC: From support ticket overload to an all-time low

CONTEXT - 4 years ago

The DLUHC administers a Regional Development Fund financed by the EU. Local Authorities must apply for a grant from this fund by submitting a proposal detailing how the money will be used to improve their community; the submission is then evaluated and either approved or rejected; if approved, the payment is disbursed. The EU retains the right to inspect records and verify transactions for several years after the disbursement.

Players: Datavid Team for DLUHC or MHCLG, UK Public Sector Department

Purpose: Manage ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) and ESF (European Social Fund), including match funding from applicants. 

Proposal: Datavid team had built a Grants management system to manage ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) and ESF (European Social Fund), including match funding from applicants. Datavid developed a workflow-based system enables departmental staff (managing authority) to:

• disburse and manage these two funds,
• publish calls,
• accept / approve / reject applications,
• set up projects,
• accept quarterly claims,
• approve claims,
• raise issues and queries,
• make payments.

It allows managing authorities to certify claims and submit Payment Applications to EU.

Benefits: Integrated, usable, and accessible interface:

• Accurate, effective, and efficient capture of project data
• Workflow-based data capture
• Reports and documentary evidence throughout the project lifecycle

Compliance: Uploading of European Strategies, applications, appraisal, approval, monitoring, evaluation, and reporting of Management Information (MI) in line with EC and UK Government requirements.

CHALLENGES

Reducing maintenance costs & volume of support tickets

The Department works across the UK to provide individuals and communities with support and services. The client’s situation presented Datavid with 2 challenges:

1. To reduce the volume of support tickets, and;
2. To decrease maintenance costs over time.

Both of these were issues the department was facing for a while, leading to inefficiencies and lower-than-expected user satisfaction due to slow support times.

When approaching a provider, the Department expected to reduce the number of resources required to triage and fix support issues, ultimately saving them money.

SOLUTION

Implementing self-service & automating data extracts

With so many support tickets to manage week in and week out, the client needed a trusted partner to help them make better use of their investment in MarkLogic.

When Datavid was presented with the challenge, we approached it with iterative improvements in mind to achieve the ultimate goal of lowering ticket volume:

1. We categorised support tickets with a matrix to identify areas of potential improvement that would have otherwise been hard to visualize.
2. Our developer then created a library of reusable scripts to solve common problems, clear the ticket backlog and stay on top of incoming tickets.

The solution was to strategically target investment at improving high-frequency processes in the system and implement self-service functionality for users to continue their work without having to wait for support.

Both significantly decreased the volume of incoming tickets.

Our reusable script library also reduced the burden on support staff by scheduling data extracts automatically instead of manually sorting through hundreds of tickets.

To achieve this solution, we monitored monthly support ticket trends quantitatively, and looked at how user needs changed qualitatively over time.

Up to this day, we invite users to leave feedback via an online survey which we review frequently to see where we can make further improvements.

RESULTS

Increasing user satisfaction & overall productivity

Datavid has supported the Department’s system for 2.5 years.

Our aim was to reduce support ticket volumes after 1 year, based on iterative improvements and user guidance. We achieved this and have continued to reduce support tickets to an all time low.

The solution led to increased user satisfaction, quicker issue resolution, and higher overall productivity by increasing the robustness of the system, automating tasks, and increasing query performance.

From a technical standpoint, we helped analyse the capacity of the service and optimized the MarkLogic cluster as a result, leading to a performance increase.

We have tracked data increases over time to understand when components would come under pressure and applied adjustments to solve the bottlenecks.