Looking to unlock value across its Business Support, and Customer Advice and Support Services teams, Scottish Borders Council partnered with CGI to identify digital opportunities aligned with its strategic goals. We delivered a comprehensive set of recommendations to help the Council transform sustainably, identifying up to £3.9 million in potential savings through innovative solutions that will also enhance customer and employee experiences.
Scottish Borders Council (SBC) is a local authority responsible for delivering public services to 115,000 residents. With approximately 4,900 employees, it provides a range of services including education, social care, justice, housing, and waste management.
Like many public sector organisations, SBC faces growing financial pressures. Within its Business Support, and Customer Advice and Support Services teams specifically (totalling 321 full-time equivalent roles), SBC needs to reduce operating costs whilst driving greater efficiency, aiming to deliver the same service on 90% of the current budget – without compromising quality.
To enable this, the Council turned to our business strategy experts – CGI has a longstanding partnership with SBC, providing both strategic advisory services and managed support.
For this engagement, SBC sought our help to gain practical transformation recommendations aligned with its strategic goals, along with support to build the required tools, knowledge and confidence to deliver that change across the organisation.
The aim was to establish a sustainable, value-focused model for continuous improvement and value delivery that would positively impact both customers and employees.
Our work will help SBC deliver meaningful outcomes across its financial, operational and strategic priorities, including:
- Up to £3.9 million in potential savings identified over five years, through 29 financial value propositions focused on cost efficiencies and income generation.
- 23 non-financial value propositions offering opportunities to enhance both customer and employee experience.
- Identified scope for immediate impact from a CGI-developed AI chatbot pilot, which would deliver early value with a clear roadmap for wider rollout.
- A comprehensive business case and embedded internal capability to support sustainable digital transformation, enabling improved service delivery and long-term fiscal savings.
We collaborated closely with SBC’s teams to identify the best opportunities to reduce costs and drive efficiencies. Using CGI’s proven value-driven digital strategy approach, we:
To build a comprehensive understanding, we reviewed a range of corporate documents – including financial statements, organisational strategic plans and departmental service plans. This desk-based analysis allowed us to identify initial insights on business challenges, which we validated with stakeholders.
We conducted financial analysis at organisational, directorate and departmental levels to highlight areas of major spend. This enabled us to generate initial value hypotheses based on high-value areas, which guided the scope and direction of our analysis.
We engaged a broad group of management and operational stakeholders across both departments. Through structured interviews, we explored objectives, pain points and opportunities across people, processes and technology dimensions.
This insight enabled us to define a set of strategic imperatives aligned with SBC’s wider organisational goals. These imperatives were validated with the business and formed the foundation for a series of value propositions – encompassing both financial and non-financial outcomes.
To quantify the potential impact, we re-engaged stakeholders to gather and validate operational data. This allowed us to conduct credible value calculations. At the same time, we applied technical expertise to shape solution options, ensuring these used SBC’s existing technical landscape and supported business capabilities.
Each solution was then costed and assessed for return on investment (ROI), culminating in a clear and compelling business case. Our recommended solutions supported strategic alignment across both departments – balancing fiscal pressures with ambitions for service improvement and digital transformation.
The outcome of our work centred around three strategic pillars, each targeting a key area of transformation across SBC’s Business Support and Customer Advice and Support Services teams:
SBC handles over 180,000 customer queries annually across six channels – live chat, phone, email, the corporate website, webforms, and in-person contact. Despite this high volume, digital enablement across these channels remained limited, resulting in inefficiencies and a heavy reliance on manual customer engagement and resolution management.
To address this, we recommended the adoption of AI-driven customer interaction tools across three of SBC’s channels as a starting point – live chat, phone and email – to enhance self-service capabilities through an AI chatbot, digital agent, and email handling.
These solutions aim to reduce manual workloads, enable faster and more scalable service delivery, and lower operational costs by:
- Automating high-volume, repetitive tasks
- Reducing reliance on manual query resolution
- Improving service consistency and speed
- Enabling data-driven insights through trend analysis and machine learning
- Providing proof of value to expand AI across remaining channels and the wider business.
Our analysis revealed a high volume of manual, inefficient and siloed processes across both departments – driven by fragmented technologies, limited digital maturity, and de-centralised budgets.
To address this, we recommended the standardisation and automation of internal workflows to improve operational efficiency, accuracy and employee experience. We identified a set of high-value, quick-realisation use cases where automation could deliver immediate benefits such as time savings, reduced error rates and improved customer service. These were supported by recommendations for technical integrations that would enable scalable, long-term improvements.
By targeting critical processes from the outset, our strategy ensures that SBC can unlock early value, build internal momentum and increase employee confidence in transformation efforts. This buy-in will also contribute to greater engagement with future change as the organisation continues to evolve.
We found that SBC’s customer data was fragmented across multiple systems, with limited integration and inconsistent data quality. This lack of data mastery and accessibility was inhibiting effective decision-making, customer experience and revenue recovery.
We therefore recommended that SBC enhances its data management and customer insight capabilities to create a single, unified customer view. By improving system integration and maturing data governance, the Council can transition to a more data-driven, digitally enabled model, enhancing outcomes across both departments.
A key focus is debt recovery as a means of increasing income generation. SBC holds significant arrears in council tax and non-domestic rates – compounded by manual processes and disconnected data – so we proposed the implementation of simple, cost effective technology to:
- Enable proactive debt recovery
- Improve data accuracy and accessibility
- Increase in-year collection rates
- Reduce long-term arrears accumulation.
Our analysis projects that this solution could help increase SBC’s in-year collections from 96.6% to 98.8%, and non-domestic rates from 97.2% to 98.8% – delivering up to £2.5 million in annual revenue. This would not only improve cash flow, but enable cost optimisation in a sustainable, non-disruptive way, reducing reliance on service cuts or workforce reduction to meet budget demands.
Working with CGI on the value proposition programme has been a highly collaborative and impactful experience. CGI’s team brought a structured, insightful approach that delivered tangible outputs but also strengthened our internal capability through knowledge transfer and practical tools we can continue to use. CGI’s professionalism, responsiveness, and strategic insight have made them a trusted partner in our transformation journey.
Senior Manager, Business Strategy & Resources, Scottish Borders Council
From the outset of the engagement, we worked closely with SBC to ensure that as we developed and delivered the digital strategy, we were also supporting its teams to learn and apply it.
We designed and delivered a tailored training programme to upskill a cohort of employees. The curriculum aligned to our delivery plan and the value-driven digital strategy, and combined theoretical learning with practical application – working through real-life scenarios using fictional case studies, collaborative workshops and structured support.
This embedded learning journey helped strengthen our long-standing relationship with SBC, and as a trusted partner, we continue to support and enable its transformation goals.
SBC is now equipped with the tools, knowledge and confidence to apply its new digital strategy to address financial constraints – creating a sustainable model for continuous improvement and value delivery across the whole organisation.
This internal capability will support a more agile, data-driven approach to transformation, helping the Council deliver its strategic imperatives and achieve operational and cost efficiencies with up to £3.9 million in potential savings.
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