Improving customer experience and dramatically reducing cost per report, with FixMyStreet Pro.
Within 12 months of switching to FixMyStreet Pro for their fault reporting, Buckinghamshire Council found they were saving up to 98.69% per report.
That's because, while a single call costs an average of £5.88 in staff time, and a report made by email—with its potential for back and forth communication to pin down the precise details—chalks up an average of £7.81, the staff time needed to handle a report delivered through FixMyStreet Pro was only 9p.
But that's not all. We spoke to Buckinghamshire, to find out more about the cost savings brought to them by FixMyStreet Pro.
49% decrease in calls
40% reduction in emails
99.5%drop in duplicate reports
59% decrease in unnecessary clarification
Saving staff time and resources
Data collected by Buckinghamshire Council reveals that they've seen a 49% decrease in calls and a 40% reduction in emails about street faults since FixMyStreet Pro was introduced back in 2018.
In case you're wondering how that translates into monetary savings, well, with FixMyStreet reports costing only 9p per report to handle for the Council, Buckinghamshire told us that this reduction in calls and emails has created savings of more than £32,000 per year.
Additionally, Buckinghamshire has seen a 29% drop in calls where residents are chasing progress: report makers no longer need to get on the phone to check whether their issue is being seen to, because updates are pushed directly back to them as the report progresses through the system.
And there's been a 59% decrease in unnecessary clarification, that is, when the council need to go back to the report-maker to check the exact location or nature of an issue. FixMyStreet can be set up to the council's exact specifications to ensure that the user is prompted to provide all the information they'll need, which accounts for this impressive drop.
Avoiding unnecessary reports
It can be a frustrating waste of time and resources when a council receives reports about issues which are not their responsibility: with the UK's two tier system, it's almost inevitable that citizens get confused about which authority deals with which category of street fault — and on top of that, there are the reports that are dealt with by other bodies such as TfL or Highways England.
FixMyStreet has always done a good job of routing reports to the right council, though, and the improvements we've made to the service over the last few years mean we can also make sure the relevant reports go through to TfL and Highways England too. Within the first year of using FixMyStreet, Buckinghamshire Council say that they saw a 19% decrease in misrouted reports that have to be forwarded elsewhere.
Decreasing duplicates
Crucially, FixMyStreet Pro enables councils to display asset layers on the map via integration with backend asset management systems, so when it comes to making reports for categories such as street lights or signals, citizens can see exactly which one they need to report. Meanwhile, this means council staff and inspectors get the most exact information available, helping to speed up response times.
Where Buckinghamshire has been using asset layers in FixMyStreet Pro, duplicate reports have dropped by a whopping 99.5%.
These figures illustrate very clearly what is meant by channel shift: real, tangible results that save money for councils, and thus ultimately, for residents too. It's great to have this confirmation that FixMyStreet Pro brings results — and we're still in a continual process of development in consultation with councils, to keep making more improvements wherever we can.