Summary:
- Staffordshire County Council (SCC) was using a functional, but limited, in-house reporting system for residents to report potholes and other highways-related issues.
- Looking to benefit from access to wider intelligence and to improve the user experience, SCC invested in the Community Central solution from Brightly Software and Jadu.
- The new system has greatly simplified the reporting process and has led to higher levels of customer satisfaction.
- A member dashboard links council members to specific reports, based on location – boosting accountability
- Improved systems intelligence compared with previous in-house software reduces duplicate reporting – with users prompted to either log new reports or add to existing ones.
- The system went live in January 2025.
Case Study
SCC has invested in a software solution to link its highways assets and its communities by implementing the Community Central platform from Brightly software and Jadu.
The council is reporting a smarter streamlined process; higher levels of customer satisfaction, and greater visibility and accountability for elected members following the investment.
The new system is reducing the duplication of reports of highways issues, and has greatly simplified the reporting process, making it easier for citizens to navigate. A ‘members dashboard’ links elected councillors with active and closed reports, boosting accountability, and customer feedback surveys indicate increased customer satisfaction with how accessible the system is and how easy it is to use. Improved efficiencies in the system’s backend meanwhile, have also been noted by the highways team.
How it works
Community Central provides a digital platform for communities to engage with, and feed into, the management of the vital assets they use each and every day. In Staffordshire, this system is now actively helping residents to report potholes, and other highways-relate issues requiring maintenance or repairs. A visual and user-friendly interface enables residents to easily report, track, and monitor highways assets that are managed in the Brightly Confirm Enterprise Asset Management System. This provides residents and stakeholders with visual, real-time information on the community assets and what work is planned, from the initial reporting of an issue, through to the resolution.
Critical to the system’s success is the deep integration with the Jadu digital platform – a leading, low-code accessible eCRM, forms and web experience platform. With Jadu, residents can quickly and simply find asset information on a map view and input accurate details about an issue. Highly streamlined and with redundant steps removed, the map view shows real time updates of progress in resolving reported issues.
This progress reporting is possible, due to the fact that reported cases are automatically raised in both Jadu and Confirm directly from the details of the resident report, removing double entry. Council staff or work crews can now update the enquiry in Confirm, which will automatically update all relevant information, regarding work and status, on the Jadu platform and also automatically notify the citizen who logged the issue (or those who added to it) of the progress in fixing it.
From smart to smarter
“We were not unhappy with our in-house offering for reporting highways issues,” Tim Heminsley, Head of Projects and Technical Services, Staffordshire County Council, explains. “We’d developed it in-house for our specific requirements and it functioned very well. We just felt that there was room to improve the system even more in adding a digital layer to automate routine functions. By connecting back office systems and streamlining services, we have improved the user experience and made the system more accessible. We wanted to maximise the quality of the data going in, and we wanted that data to be as accessible as possible. The end result is a system that makes it considerably easier for local residents to report and track highways maintenance issues, such as potholes and flooded roads.”
He continues: “To a large extent this was driven by elected council members. As the public face of the council they were keenly aware of the frustrations many residents experienced with what they perceived as slow response times to resolve issues like potholes or other highways repairs.
“We considered upgrading our own system, but ultimately decided that we stood to benefit from the wider intelligence that would come from investing in a digital platform from an external provider working with multiple clients. We put it out to tender and Brightly’s response with Community Central, and the added benefits of the integration with Jadu, really impressed. The digital layer provided by Jadu enables citizens to raise an issue and then be fully informed and kept in the loop from start to finish, providing an overall better user experience. Add to that the fact that we were already using the Brightly Confirm solution to manage our highways assets, and this became an even easier choice.”
A transformed digital experience for citizens
SCC’s previous in-house reporting system was fairly simple to use – but Heminsley is delighted with the streamlining plus improved accessibility and user experience that’s already evident just three months on from activation. “We do regular customer satisfaction surveys,” he explains. “And we’ve immediately seen an uptick since Community Central went live. The highly visual user interface makes it incredibly intuitive to use, and the seamless integration with Confirm means that report updates automatically feed through to the end user – so residents have a very real appreciation of progress towards resolution of reports that they’ve raised.”
“Everything from indicating the level of urgency of a job, through to describing it, has become simpler, with easy-to-use and easy-to-understand menu options.”
“The implementation process in the latter part of 2024 was very smooth,” he adds. “We were not a particularly straightforward client to work with because we had a number requirements based on functionality in our original system that we needed to replicate. Both the Jadu and Brightly implementation teams were responsive, open and collaborative and they developed a really strong working relationship with our team that has continued after the go-live date.”
Staying accountable
“Elected officials are answerable to their voters,” Heminsley concludes. “I see this whole exercise as a great example of SCC’s elected members driving a change that is going to improve the lives of the people in the communities they serve. With hugely improved functionality and a member dashboard to link elected councillors to specific projects, SCC members are addressing the frustrations of their communities head on and making themselves a visible part of the solution.”
Image credit: Pexels_NicoletteVillavicencio
