Alongside our team’s love for Cornish pasties and ice cream, we love that we’re able to share our new partnership with Cornwall Council’s registration team!
Working with Sarah-Jane, Kathryn and the team, we’ll be setting out to help residents and customers access vital services easier than ever before.
Read on to see the key areas we’ll be focusing on over the course of the project.
Cornwall’s goals
Cornwall’s ambitions for the service’s future drove the desire to switch to Stopford, with their targets being to:
- Streamline all forms and processes into one system. Removing the need for disparate systems that didn’t communicate with one another
- Enable online booking and automation that would take the pressure off of the registration team and contact centre
- To maximise efficiency and exceed commercial expectations of their marriage and civil partnership ceremony operations
Streamlining service operations and online booking
The service’s existing digital footprint consists of a number of embedded forms for notices and ceremonies, however, this hasn’t been scalable for all of the service’s needs, resulting in a lot of manual work for the registration team.
Working with Sarah-Jane and Kathryn, we’ll be hoping to ensure we cover any digital gaps, for example their birth registrations which are currently booked manually or through contact centre, and optimising existing booking forms in line with legislation and with use of registration-specific functionality.
This will include online and admin processes for:
- Births – 37th highest number of births in England and Wales (2022) – ONS
- Deaths
- Notices
- Ceremonies – 7th highest number of ceremonies in England and Wales (2020) – ONS
- Final Ceremony Payment (the acceptance of outstanding ceremony balances)
- Citizenships
In addition to this, we’ll be looking to help the Cornwall team optimise recurring tasks and timeslot availability. This includes managing copy certificate orders through our dedicated module, simplifying certificate inventory and ensuring the receipt of the MCCD before allowing booking (Restrictive List).
In introducing Agenda for Registrars, the aim will be to support Cornwall’s registrars in moving away from using various forms, a separate diary system and spreadsheets as part of their daily operations, saving the registrars time and freeing up availability for other tasks.
Support their ceremony business ambitions
With stunning backdrops and (mostly optimal!) weather, Cornwall’s registrars are some of the busiest, with visitors across the UK flocking to the destination.
This popularity however presents challenges on how to best meet the increased demand, and how they can best harness digital solutions to deliver the best possible experience from the point of booking to the ceremony itself.
Together, we will hope to not only introduce comprehensive online flows for ceremonies and taking outstanding balances, but also:
- Support Cornwall’s tier and fee structure
- Facilitate payment of booking fees and full fees (latter to be used for register office ceremonies for example)
- Automate communications for confirmations, reminders about outstanding fees/notices etc.
- Introduce Ceremony Planner, a way of enabling couples to submit their ceremony choices online (e.g. music, readings, vows etc.)
Kathryn Burge, Customer Operations Manager at Cornwall Council said this about the new partnership:
“Our journey with Stopford started with an incredibly thorough demo from Paul, his knowledge about the registration service and all its many quirks was clear from the start. Stopford felt designed to suit our needs exactly.
Throughout the G Cloud process our communication with Chris and Paul was responsive and honest. We’re excited to be moving forward with implementing our new system and can’t wait to see how much it’s going to enhance our customers journey and how much time it’s going to save us!!”
We look forward to getting started with the team at Cornwall!