Background

Engaging with the community and providing greater levels of transparency has generally been a challenging endeavour as community members rely on a variety of information and need to be regularly kept up to date as the status and circumstances of events, activities, facilities and services change.

Through the Elafent Cloud Platform (ECP), we’ve empowered organisations to share information more effectively and keep community members up to date with the latest information on events, activities, facilities and services which could impact them, the wider community, their business or their family and friends.

Operational Challenges

Sharing operational information with the members of the community is generally not a straightforward exercise. In many cases - 

• Community members rely on a variety of information such as the status and location of planned/current works, outages, events, sporting grounds, facilities and transport services and any accompanying documentation

• Community related information sets reside across a number of complex internal systems

• Organisations need to manually strip out sensitive operational information and create new data sets suitable for public consumption with the right terminology that is free of any internal jargon

• Separate community facing applications require a lot of heavy lifting, investment and resources to implement, maintain and manage

• Community related information is spread across multiple online resources and applications

• Public facing community information is not updated regularly as it requires manual data updates performed outside of day to day operational tasks.

 Community members often - 

• Need to navigate and search across multiple online applications and resources in order to find the information they need

• Are not kept up to date as the status of information important to them changes

• Revert to contacting the call centre when they can’t find the information they need or want to get an update.

The impact of these limitations and challenges can lead to -

• Higher volumes of inbound calls and community information requests

• Increased operational costs

• Reduced community satisfaction and trust

• Frustrated community members and staff.

Operational Optimisation

Elafent empowers organisations to engage with the community effectively by providing a compelling and effective way to share operational with members of the public and keep them up to date on matters which are important to them.

Key elements of this capability include -

• Seamless information sharing enabling information on planned/current works, outages, events, transport services and facilities to be made available to the public without doing any heavy lifting

• Aggregation and correlation of community information enabling stakeholders to find what they need in one place and easily identify the location and status of any activities or services which could impact them, the wider community, their business or their family and friends

• Support for self-service empowering stakeholders to opt-in and stay up to date as the status of activities or services change by subscribing to notifications via SMS and/or email

• Simple to configure display rules enabling organisations to apply logic to transform the data displayed publicly so it is suitable for community consumption, contains the appropriate terminology and is free from any internal jargon or sensitive information

• Real-time data updates enabling information shared with the community to be updated via an API as soon as the source data is changed without requiring any additional manual data updates or effort

• Responsive application design enabling community members to get a great experience on mobile, tablet and desktop devices via the browser

• SaaS based cloud platform enabling organisations to get up and running quickly and cost effectively with minimal upfront investment and ongoing overheads.

The screen below illustrates how the Elafent Engagement app can be utilised to provide the community members with real-time visibility of planned and current works and enable members of the public to opt-in to subscribe to updates on a particular job and receive notifications as the status of the job changes -

Business Impact

The impact of improving transparency and sharing operational information with the community effectively is clear with the adoption of a platform which can be rapidly deployed without any heavy lifting. Benefits include -

• Improved community engagement, trust and satisfaction

• Reduced load on call centre/customer service staff through the promotion of self-service

• Reduced operational costs.

As an example, the table below illustrates the business value the Elafent Engagement App will deliver versus attempting the same coverage with a call centre customer service employee -

These figures are based on a comparison with a permanent call centre and customer service employee salary of $51,867 equating to an hourly amount of $29.28 which was the average advertised annual salary package for August 2016 in Australia according to SEEK Employment Trends.