Harrow Council Partners With 8×8

Harrow Council has deployed the 8×8 integrated cloud contact centre and communications product as part of its digital transformation agenda to enhance the delivery of essential services for its more than 240,000 residents.

As one of London’s 32 borough councils, Harrow Council embarked on an ambitious digital transformation plan to improve the services provided to residents, businesses and visitors.

The Council faced challenges that are common among public sector organizations. It was hampered by legacy on-premises systems that were unreliable and costly to maintain and offered limited functionality.

These technology shortcomings were further exacerbated when the Council’s mission-critical “Access Harrow” contact centre and telephony system struggled to support employees and contact centre agents transitioning to remote work.

With their decision to replace their legacy systems, Harrow Council selected 8×8’s integrated cloud contact centre and communications platform to improve manageability and reliability, ensure business resilience, enable an operate-from-anywhere workforce and lower costs.

Working with 8×8, the Council quickly equipped their 160 “Access Harrow” operators – who handle everything from missed garbage collection to helping residents pay their council tax – with the ability to engage customers across voice and digital channels while having a 360-degree view of customer needs and interactions.

8×8’s intuitive user experience and enhanced functionality helped make the deployment and adoption easy and seamless even as most employees were trained remotely.

The result was a streamlined employee and customer experience with advanced analytics and reporting, allowing operators to consult and collaborate with colleagues to resolve customer issues through immediate access to relevant information.

The Harrow Council deployment reflects the wider success 8×8 has experienced within the UK public sector in the last year:

• The number of UK public sector customers has nearly doubled year-over-year, ending 31 December 2020, with NHS Trust deployments growing significantly over the same timeframe.
• 8×8 is providing integrated cloud communications and contact centre services to more than a third of London’s boroughs.
• 8×8 recently signed and deployed additional public sector customers, including:
  – Liverpool City Council, a local government serving one of the largest metropolitan districts in the UK. Working with 8×8, Liverpool City Council is providing essential services for residents and businesses while enabling remote work from anywhere.
  – Public Health Scotland, the specialist national health care services provider in Scotland which supports the 14 NHS health boards across its 5.5 million citizens, selected the 8×8 integrated cloud communications and contact centre product.
  – Kent Community Health, a UK NHS provider of community services, selected 8×8 to accelerate their digital transformation and improve customer experience.
  – Newham College of Further Education, a large general further education college in the London Borough of Newham, selected the 8×8 integrated cloud communications and contact centre product through the partnership with Virgin Media Business.

Ben Goward, ICT Director at Harrow Council, said: “As we made a smooth transition into the cloud, the 8×8 delivery team was with us every step of the way, ensuring we were ready to make the switch. The level of support they provided those initial weeks made what felt like a mammoth task more manageable.”

“Working with 8×8 has enabled us to adopt a nimble, hybrid approach, allowing our staff to work from anywhere while providing residents, businesses and visitors with the essential services they require.”

“One of the public sector’s main challenges is trying to transform organizational performance and services with limited resources and outdated technology,” said Jamie Snaddon, Managing Director, EMEA at 8×8.

“Providing Harrow Council with an integrated communications and contact centre solution has allowed them to rapidly transition to the cloud, under difficult circumstances, without impacting the essential services they deliver to the community.”

“We look forward to working together as they roll out additional services in the coming months.”

Author: Robyn Coppell