St Albans City & District Council transform maintenance requests with Arcus
Amongst other things, the Covid world has accelerated the expectations of its citizens, who are now increasingly demanding a fast and seamless digital element to their public services. They need to be able to interact on their own terms, through any device in any location. More advanced local authorities like St Albans City & District Council are taking significant steps to deliver this experience to the community.
Daniel Flitton, Principle Green Spaces Officer at St Albans City & District Council explains how the Arcus ‘Quick Report It’ (QRI) tool is helping to simplify and manage the way residents, visitors and business owners report a number of different community issues to the council, including fly-tipping, vandalism and dog fouling:
“Quick Report It has brought order to chaos. Since April, we have handled over 2,200 cases.
We are a small team that manages the Council’s grounds maintenance contract, which includes parks and green spaces, housing sites, cemeteries, highway verges, grass and trees. We look after something on pretty much every street in the District of St Albans.
Summer is normally our busiest time, but this year has been unprecedented. We tend to receive a range of reports, many of them requiring investigation. QRI along with our salesforce CRM, also supplied by Arcus, has embedded a structured process that enables us to manage enquiries and respond much more efficiently. We are a very happy team now we have QRI!
I can’t tell you how important QRI has been to us, Arcus implemented it very quickly for us at the start of Covid and we couldn’t have got through the last few months without it.”
Arcus supports local authorities with cloud-based and easy-to-use systems as they transition from ‘doing digital’ to ‘being digital’. The QRI application is quick to implement and highly configurable. It features customisable forms to ensure all the correct information is gathered and can be easily triaged by council staff, allowing them to prioritise their responses, avoid duplicates and submit updates, so citizens can view the outcome of their report. QRI is also fully mobile with location validation, enabling precise location reporting, which stops out of area enquiries being submitted, ensuring only relevant reports are attended to.
Using a digital approach, St Albans has been able to improve its internal processes and community interactions, helping to build trust and offer more innovative services to citizens.
Praise for Arcus Global’s efficient and user-friendly system at Allerdale Borough Council

With the need for easy-to-use services, operational integrity and good governance higher than ever, Allerdale Borough Council was recently visited by a team of external auditors to review its building control service.
At the conclusion of the visit, the auditors commented on how efficient and user-friendly the Arcus Global system was. They were especially impressed with the dashboards, and said that the audit visit was the best that they had undertaken this year.
Arcus Global supports councils with cloud-based and easy-to-use building control systems aimed at making life simpler for staff and citizens alike. With audit results to prove it, Allerdale can continue to set the standard for delivering exceptional building control services.
About Arcus Global
Arcus Global, formed in 2009 and based in Cambridge UK, is a market-leading GovTech cloud company, delivering mission-critical technology solutions that enable public sector organisations to transform their service delivery.
Arcus has developed a platform-based suite of Applications for Local and Central Government. Addressing the challenges in Citizen Digital interaction, Citizen relationship management and through specific platform-based case management solutions for Planning, Building Control, Licensing and Environmental Health etc.
Arcus has grown to over 30 customers including Folkestone & Hythe District Council, Eastleigh Borough Council, The London Borough of Islington, Wiltshire County Council, Department for Culture Media & Sport and the Home Office.
Moving the Public Sector from ‘doing digital’ to ‘being digital’
Contact
Charlotte Fionda, Marketing Manager at Arcus Global