The way to the goal
1. Initial situation
The city of Hanover has more than half a million inhabitants, each of whom ‘has to go to the office’ - for example, to renew their ID card, register a car or register or deregister a business. To do this, they visit one of the nine citizens' offices or the other relevant authorities. Every day, around 3,000 customers visit the citizens' offices alone, some of whom have clicked through the individual locations online in advance to see when the next appointment is available for their particular concern. Once on site, the next challenge awaited them, as the service centre of the state capital of Hanover on Schützenplatz is a complex building that houses hundreds of offices on six floors. Finding the relevant office and then the right room was often difficult, especially as some offices have separate waiting areas. As a result, many appointments went unused because customers were simply sitting in the wrong waiting area.
2. Solution
The city of Hanover introduced the Smart Customer eXperience visitor control and queue management system from Smart CJM to simplify visits to the authorities for its customers and to optimise internal processes. Combined with the digital building management system from Catchup Applications, it is used in the vehicle registration office, the citizens' offices, the driving licence office, the registry office and the trade office.
Since then, the procedure, exemplary for the citizens' offices, has been as follows: If required, customers first go to the City of Hanover's service portal to find out about the service they require. From there, they are taken to the online appointment scheduling page, where they are asked to enter the postcode of their main place of residence to check their area of responsibility. After selecting their request, they are shown the next possible appointments for each citizens' office as well as corresponding alternatives. After selecting an appointment and submitting the data, you will receive a confirmation e-mail with information on which documents you need to bring with you.
3. Goals achieved
This new, practical procedure also has advantages for the administration of the City of Hanover. Appointments run more smoothly, as customers generally have all the necessary documents to hand. Above all, however, the Smart CJM solution allows the available appointment quota to be distributed evenly across all locations and stored for the respective citizens' offices. With a cancellation option, the no-show quota can be reduced so that capacities that become available can be reallocated. In addition, staff can be planned more specifically depending on the expected workload and employees can use the solution to control the waiting areas.
