Surrey County provides citizens with seamless, proactive, multichannel support

England’s Surrey County Council provides a range of services to over 1.1 million residents—from the renewal of a library book, to adult and children’s social care, to transport. They’re also revolutionizing the way people interact with government authorities through a desire to provide a better customer experience.

“We have a lot of customers contacting the local authority on a daily basis,” said Mark Irons, Head of Customer Services. “But despite growing population and an increase in the channels customers reach out to us in, we’ve had budget cuts. You can imagine why we needed a solution that would help us be as efficient as possible.”

Irons and his team handle roughly 2,000 requests a day with Zendesk Support, through several different channels. “The way customers contact us is changing. Customers have begun to reach out via Twitter in addition to email and phone,” Irons explained. “With Zendesk, we can screen Twitter for any mentions about Surrey. Rather than letting things fester, we can actively look for problems and respond.”

Surrey County Council uses Zendesk Support to pull information from 18 different systems, due to the diversity of services they offer. With the help of Support, they have been able to create a seamless transition of customer information between channels and between systems.