Background
The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service are also better known as Acas. Although they receive government funding, they're an independent public body that provides free and impartial advice to employees and employers: supporting them with employment rights, best practice or policies and helping to resolve workplace disputes. They also offer paid for services such as mediation and training.
We worked with Acas to develop a set of technology solutions to improve efficiencies in case allocation, reduce backlog and improve their overall customer experience.
The service was provided within the Government Digital Services framework, using an agile approach.
Situation
- At Acas, all cases notified were reviewed and allocated manually.
- These manual processes meant that allocation of a case to a conciliator took an average of 4.75 days from notification by the service user.
- This significantly shortened the time left in the fixed 6-week window available for conciliation.
- The lack of transparency internally around case allocation was also leading to concerns around equitable distribution.
Solution
- Wyser implemented minimum data requirements for all cases before they can be allocated to a conciliator.
- Non-critical information at allocation could be collected during the service user's conversation with the conciliator.
- Working with Acas, Wyser developed a set of rules and supporting engine to automatically categorise and allocate cases on:
Case type / complexity
conciliator / team capacity
conciliator availability.
- Only cases that needed manual preparation were passed to the reparation team, the remainder were allocated directly to the conciliator, in real-time.
Outcome
- 92% of cases are now capable of being auto allocated.
- Cases are automatically allocated within 25 minutes of notification by the service user.
- Conciliators have the entire 6-week window available for conciliation in most cases.
- Service users get faster first contact from their conciliator.
- Linked cases are identified quicker.
- The overhead involved in managing the process manually has been significantly reduced with staff being redeployed to higher value work.
- Further costs have been avoided and customer service improved.