Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council

Bwdbc has identified the potential to make savings 24K by digitising how we handle document verification for several services.

The most popular choice is for customers to bring documentation in to the reception centres in either Blackburn or Darwen town hall. The service has had some success in transferring customers to photograph and email evidence. This provides convenience and increased customer confidence as there is no risk of documents being lost in the post.

Despite the success of moving some customer groups to the online option we still have staff in Blackburn town hall whose full-time job is verifying documents. To modernise and digitalise the verification process further, we would like to explore some self-service scanning stations that will allow customers to submit documents in our reception centres without any staff intervention, encouraging customers to self-serve and expand their own knowledge of technology usage

At present, Customer Services provide a Verification service in Blackburn and Darwen town hall receptions. Customers are issued with a ticket and then see a Customer Service Advisor who scans the documents and uploads them on to the appropriate system. In the last twelve months we have processed 18’378 customer visits involving verifying and scanning customer documents .