Background

The Trading Standards Institute (TSI) is the leading professional body representing Trading Standards professionals in the UK and overseas - in local authorities, the business and consumer sectors and in central government.

Our brief

Was to develop a new website portal that incorporated an online case handling system for TSI in partnership with Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the UK European Consumer Centre Network (UKECC). The management system had to record all enquiries, information and advice requests from consumers and businesses requiring services in the EU. An enquiry could be by telephone, email, fax, letter or submitted via an online
form.

Our solution

BOCC ultilised our content management system - YouDu CMS as the underlying technology for the portal. The portal includes a number of different information areas and sections, which are managed as content through the CMS. TSI staff are able to make frequent and quick updates to content using the web browser based CMS interface.

BOCC also developed and integrated a 'Knowledge Base' that is managed by the CMS, which contain articles advising businesses and consumers on various issues. The articles are coded at using the OFT coding system, to denote the type of advice and the related country. So for example, an article related to sales of land in Spain would have the following coding:

Level 0: Spain (County)
Level 1: General Consumer services
Level 2: Dwelling services
Level 3: Sales of Land

A portal visitor can find articles on the site either by linking to them directly through a unique URL, or by browsing for information using a user-friendly version of the OFT coding system. All articles are displayed as HTML pages deleivered by the CMS. Articles are given version numbers and each time an article is updated, the version number in incremented. The
CMS automatically stores older versions of the article in the system for auditing, but only the latest article will be available on the portal. A unique URL for each article version is created for the Case Handling System for auditing purposes.

If a visitor is unable to find the information that they need from the Knowledge Base, then they can submit an enquiry via the online form, which is then recorded in the case handling system. An email notification will also be sent to the user with a case reference number confirming the receipt of their enquiry. An email will also be generated by the system for allocation to an agent, who will respond to the enquiry.

Once a response has been generated, an email is sent to the user with the response related information. All information is subsquently logged in the case handling system and recorded for viewing and future reporting.

BOCC provided a reporting tool that includes the following reports:

• Number of enquries
• Average duration of enquiry (time between when the enquiry is created and the time when the response is submitted).
• Keywords Used

Reports can be filtered by the following user defined fields:

• User can filter by date range
• Coding (only 1 at a time, any level including country)
• Type (consumer, business or portal)
• Method of contact
• By Agent
• Enquiries requiring further action

Technologies

The system utilises:

• Microsoft™ SQL Server 2005
• Adobe® ColdFusion®
• XML Web Services
• Hosting on fully managed dedicated web servers at BOCC
• SSL (Secure Server Certificate)
• Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.0 compliant