Case Study: Nottingham City Council achieves streamlined citizen feedback handling and improved service performance with Ideagen's Covalent Feedback module

Integrating Covalent’s Feedback module with the Council’s Corporate website

Nottingham City Council needed a better way to capture and act on citizen feedback as part of its Citizen First transformation and a manifesto pledge to improve satisfaction. At the time feedback was handled via a single central inbox and manually distributed, which was slow and inconsistent; the Council therefore sought a performance management solution that could consolidate feedback with KPI, risk and action data. Covalent — already used by neighbouring authorities — was identified as a suitable platform.

Council, ICT and Covalent teams developed an integrated solution linking the public website contact form and an intranet form to a customised Covalent Feedback module, with workflows, escalation rules and extra fields to match council processes. The system went live internally in July 2012 and publicly in August, enabling automated routing, better data quality, and frontline closure of many cases (around 80% resolved at first contact). By the end of September the Council had processed roughly 800 items (about 60% complaints, 40% compliments), and is planning further integration with business planning, action and risk modules to drive ongoing improvement.

Nottingham City Council

Gary Dawes

Nottingham City Council