Interact will enable them to provide better and quicker customer service to their residents by giving staff quick and easy access to council information. Interact will also help engender a collaborative environment for sharing knowledge, ideas and best practices by connecting staff across teams and departments.
Staff wanted a system that was easy to use and logically designed and the board wanted something that represented value for money. Being a local government authority, it is important that they are able to work efficiently and within budget. Residents’ money needs to be invested wisely and Interact gives them the opportunity to implement a solution that offers a quick return on investment. This, in turn, allows them to ‘pay it back’ to residents by giving them a much quicker and improved customer service - for example staff will be able to tell a resident what their closest Local Service Centre is, or the latest parking rules on their street.
Newham reviewed several different intranet solutions, including SharePoint and other intranet builders, before selecting Interact. Lizzie Barrett, Internal Communication Manager at Newham, believes that Interact provides them with the perfect solution “Not only is it very easy to use, the fact that you can adapt the look and feel and have various ‘permissions’ for users means that we can target pages to different audiences. It was also much more cost effective than building an intranet through Sharepoint, and had a lot of the initial user-friendly features we wanted, including rating pages and being able to bring people, documents and pages up in a keyword search.”
Newham are confident that staff will engage with Interact – collaborative features such as being able to comment on and rate content means they will use the intranet more frequently which means that in turn they will be exposed to other news and information increasing their knowledge about the council. Staff will be able to learn more about what other teams in the Council do via Interact which will help build a collaborative working environment with more effective information sharing.
Lizzie Barrett goes on to say: “We were looking for a way to make our intranet logical, tidy, useful and a bit more fun. Interact solves that problem for us. We feel that Interact will help us make our residents happy by giving staff the information they need to do their jobs, as well as providing ways for them to tell us how they feel. If we are able to make our employees happier by giving them easily-accessible information, up-to-date news and useful contact details for teams, then we know that happiness with pass on to our residents through better and quicker customer service.”
About Interact Intranet
Interact is a versatile, fully secure Intranet which can be quickly and easily updated by non technical users. It seamlessly integrates with other IT applications providing a single one-stop portal for business processes and information such as staff details, news and procedures.
The core software comprises a sophisticated range of built-in applications and contains all the features you need for a powerful and flexible strategic intranet which promotes collaboration and communication. A range of sophisticated additional plug-in business software is available to suit key business processes.
The latest version of the software, Interact 4, has been developed to take advantage of the latest technologies as used by websites like Facebook and Amazon. Its unique Intelligence Store logs information such as browsing routes, search entries, documents ratings and hits and uses this information to promote content to users. It automatically creates links to other information such as articles, discussions, events and people so that each piece of information is not isolated, but is part of a greater whole – the intranet information store. The more the intranet is used and the more content is added the more powerful and effective it becomes.
About Odyssey Interactive
Founded in 1996, Odyssey Interactive Ltd is one of the UK’s longest established web development companies. Based in Altrincham, Cheshire, the company specialises in providing the UK’s leading out-of-the box intranet solution, Interact.
With over a decade of experience Odyssey has built a solid reputation for both product excellence and outstanding customer service. Organisations using Interact report improved efficiency, greater productivity, increased staff commitment, better decision making and cost savings. Interact is used by over 150,000 people across a diverse range of clients in both the private and public sectors including HMV, Waterstone’s, Chelsea Football Club, Tyco ADT, Tradeteam DHL, Amicus, CLIC Sargent, Calor as well as NHS and social housing organisations.
