As the dispute between refuse collectors and Birmingham City Council continues, we look at how ESB can help you communicate effectively with residents and businesses during times of crisis.

One area in which local authorities have often been criticised is their ability to communicate effectively with large groups of residents, businesses and other key stakeholders during times of crisis or change. As a company that has worked closely with local authorities for many years, we are aware of the challenges facing authorities when it comes to providing a cost-effective way of communicating quickly with their customers: Disparate, poorly connected systems of varying quality make it hard to establish a reliable and up to date customer database. Even many of the promises of the leading CRM systems have proven hard to realise, with many local authorities struggling to maintain GDPR-compliant customer data.

ESB has its roots firmly in local government – being the only service delivery platform of its kind that was developed entirely in the UK specifically for the local authority market.

Our Self-Service portal provides a fully GDPR-compliant mechanism for residents and businesses to interact with the Council online – including managing a full profile of communication options that provide the ability for the council to quickly and effectively communicate with targeted groups based on a variety of criteria. Modern communication methods such as e-mail and SMS are significantly cheaper and considerably more flexible than more traditional methods such as mailshots – and allow key pieces of information to be disseminated easily to large numbers of individuals.

If you would like to find out more about how the ESB platform is already helping local authorities take back control of their customer data, please get in touch here or e-mail hello@pentagull.co.uk.