Bracknell Forest Borough Council

Digital payment processes

Traditionally customers have paid for a variety of services using a range of payment methods, including cash, cheques and paper direct debits forms. Customers increasingly tell us that they prefer to report, book and pay for services online at a time convenient to them.

Using multiple payment channels causes difficulties in matching payments to services that customers have paid for, in addition to being a costly exercise for us to process due to back office manual handling of payments. Current processes result in staff having to manually check payments, issue refunds and wait for cheques to clear before providing the service. We have calculated that if we switch around 80% of our payments; using digital end to end utilising integrations: we will save over £100K, which can be used to support our more vulnerable resident’s as well as improving the consistency of customer experience.

We want to:
Investigate integration solutions with our Forms system to simplify processes and match payments to customers using Gov.UK Pay portal as a pilot partner and test Local Authority.
Investigate and implement solutions for wireless payments such as chip and pin
Implement digital direct debits – with integrated back office functionality replacing paper and manual handling based systems, specifically setting up DD mandates.

Discovery evidence

We have co-created with staff  a customer experience model which is changing the way that many services are delivered, improving efficiency and effectiveness by improving processes, use of information, and technology plus empowering customers to be more digitally focussed and automated where possible.

We have undertaken a range of service redesign workshops with staff to encourage culture change to move to digital by default payment processes and used our resident’s survey and informal surveying to find out how our customer which to be communicated with.

We are working with Gov.UK pay on piloting and design of a Bracknell Forest payment portal. We have not yet begun to investigate or test integrations with our back office systems.