Cardiff sees the Benefit

Cardiff Council delivers services to more than 320,000 residents and when we were approached by their Benefits team to upgrade their Queue Management system at Marland House, we were delighted to help. The system they had been using successfully for more than 11 years was System 8, the forerunner of our System 16 and they wanted to enhance their system to include an LCD screen with announcements and waiting times, instant real-time reports and Web-based virtual key pads. They also needed to gather data and print reports about all their enquiries.

After key members of the Benefits staff had visited our demonstration room and had a hands-on experience of our ranges of new hardware and Smartsoft modules, we met up at Marland House to see how we could improve their Customer flow.

For optimum flow, we decided to organise the customers into three groups. One group turned up for appointments in the interview rooms. The next group staff had named Fast-track customers, as they didn't require any advice but just came to pick up or leave forms or leaflets and the third group were customers who needed assistance so they took a ticket and waited until directed to a Counter position.

We suggested installing a TFT over the Fast-track counter and running a Head-of-Queue mode to call these customers forward. At busy times, the TFT could then be set up to direct customers to an additional counter. Each counter position used Smartkey, so both Fast-track customers and customers in the ticket queue could have data records collected about their visit. Smartkey was also used in every interview room to create data records for each appointment.

Smartkey, our Web-based Virtual key pad, is fully compatible with the counter positions Standard Rich client PCs and the Thin Clients running off a Citrix server used in the interview rooms.

We decided to upgrade the printer to our new CXL-TPS and change the Counter displays to 3 digits as customer numbers often reached 400 per day. The LED Customer display was replaced with a Professional LCD screen, configured by Smartmonitor, to display and announce the tickets being served, counter numbers and the average waiting times.

In this way, the three separate queues were smoothly organised and their respective data accurately recorded and analysed. Staff can now print out a wide range of reports instantly and are delighted with the improvements requested and delivered.