Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council works hard to serve over 243,300 residents in the north of England. They wanted to enable digital channel shift for their Registration Services by allowing citizens to book appointments using a simple online process.
They worked alongside JRNI, formerly BookingBug, and BookingLab to pilot appointment booking for their Registration Services. The partnership was the natural choice to support the council’s key strategies and to kickstart their channel shift ambitions of 70% of transactions being completed online via self-service platforms by 2020.
Registration Services was the ideal place to pilot a booking system as it is used by a high volume of customers, and is in constant demand. The service contained many bookable services, each needing their own separate customer journey:
- Registering a birth
- Making changes to a birth certificate
- Registering a death
- Registering a stillborn baby
- Arranging a wedding (book a Registrar)
- Giving notice of a marriage or civil partnership
- Arranging a civil partnership
The Council took bookings for these services during office hours by telephone. Once requested, staff would check a paper-based system for availability. This labor intensive system was time consuming and often duplicative, leaving staff unable to answer calls during busy periods.
Barnsley wanted to make services more accessible to their customers, and reduce time spent on the telephone or doing administrative tasks. After evaluating a number of products, the BookingLab offering built on the JRNI platform was chosen.
The solution requirements were clear: Barnsley was looking for a booking system that could accommodate the volume of resources and configurations across their service. They also wanted a solution that both customers and staff could quickly adopt and use.
BookingLab worked closely with Barnsley's senior registration team to understand and map the requirements for each service. They wanted customers to pay for services in advance, so the ability to integrate with a payment system was critical. There were also other factors to consider, such as web accessibility and GDPR requirements, which BookingLab enabled via the JRNI solution.
Finally, in order to monitor and improve their service offering, Barnsley wanted JRNI to integrate with their existing customer management system to support statutory reporting requirements.
Michelle Cheetham, Project Lead for Barnsley MBC, added: “We’ve always found that BookingLab have a very flexible and supportive approach... they have always been keen to work with us to ensure we maximize the benefits to be accrued from the design and implementation of the solution.”
Barnsley was very encouraged by the adoption to date – after only three months, 49% of registrar bookings were made online. Since the online launch, there have been more than 700 transactions through the solution each month, which has significantly reduced administration time. This shift to a majority online service has allowed staff to focus on service delivery and promotion.
With the help of JRNI’s powerful administration tools and integration with their existing systems, staff are now able to manage and understand their customers better, and provide an excellent customer experience.
But the proof is in the feedback: Over 85% of users rate the service journey as “Good.”
BookingLab is now working with Barnsley to implement JRNI to support Adult Learning. This will provide a customer journey that is accessible to all, for booking pre-assessments and advisory appointment services.
