7 ways payment solutions can help local councils save time and deliver an exceptional customer experience

When it comes to taking payments, it’s easy to write it off as a purely transactional, functional task. But for local councils, an exceptional payment solution can create ripple effects across the business. Here’s how. 

By providing customers – and departments – with payments choice

We all expect to be able to pay for goods and services in whichever way we want, wherever we want. And when we can’t, we notice – and often feel negativity towards whichever organisation we want to pay or buy something from. 

By offering a wide range of payment options – from online and over the phone or on the go – you can ensure the act of making a payment is a simple one for your customers, rather than being a source of frustration. 

Internally, it’s important too. Offering a wide range of solutions ensures each department has methods of receiving payments that are suitable for their needs, and speeds things up, too. 

By being available around the clock

The days of only taking payments during traditional business hours are well and truly over. Today, organisations need to be able to transact around the clock – and that means having payment options that never sleep. 

And it’s important, too, because people make payments 24/7. So by making it easy for customers to make payments whenever they want, you’re reducing the load on staff when it comes to manual chasing and follow-up, and reduces the team effort required enabling payments to be made more efficiently. 

By enabling easy collation across distributed departments

Local councils have many different revenue streams, with different departments overseeing different sources of income. By ensuring your payments solution is capable of collating cross-division transactions, you can reconcile with ease, and have a real-time source of truth, all day, every day. 

By providing real-time reporting

From car park revenue to council tax, councils have a whole host of income streams to manage. By choosing a payments solution with real-time reporting, you have up-to-the-minute information from which to build reports. 

By protecting your reputation with the latest security

Brand reputation has always been incredibly important, and a market-leading payments solution will help protect your customers online, as well as enable your organisation to be PCI compliant. 

With user access management as standard, a strong payment solution will help keep your organisation’s finances safe and secure, too. 

By understanding the intricacies of your organisation

The payments platform you choose should meet your organisation’s needs and understand the intricacies of your business, rather than being a one-size-fits-all solution. By choosing payments technology that is built for distributed teams and offers features like the ability to collate and validate payments, as well as export ledgers, you’re using a platform that was purpose-built for your type of business. 

By deploying across multiple merged authorities

Increasingly, councils are sharing IT services across multiple authorities – and a solution that offers the ability to support multiple merged authorities is important for both today and tomorrow. By using a solution such as Adelante that can work across multiple authorities, you can save significant amounts of money in licence fees and hosting costs – meaning your budgets go further. 

Adelante – purpose-built for local authorities

Adelante’s payment solutions have been built specifically for local authorities, and we currently work with councils across the country to provide a wide range of payment and income management solutions. 

Find out more about Adelante’s local government and council solutions.