How Trafford Council Cut Follow-Up Correspondence by 50% Using Power BI

Public sector organisations deal with enormous amounts of data. Resident contacts, service requests, complaint volumes, case outcomes, team performance. The problem is rarely that the data does not exist. The problem is usually that it is scattered across five different systems, takes two days to pull together and by the time the report lands in someone's inbox it is already out of date.

That was the situation I walked into at Trafford Council.

The challenge

The Corporate Front Door team manages the point of contact between residents and council services. When someone calls, emails or submits a request, it comes through here. Understanding how well that is working - how many contacts get resolved first time, how many come back with follow-up queries, where the friction is - matters enormously both for service quality and for cost.

The reporting that existed was manual. Data was being pulled from Dynamics 365 and various other systems, combined in spreadsheets and sent around by email. It was slow, inconsistent and gave leadership a backwards-looking view of performance. By the time an issue showed up in the data, it had already been happening for weeks.

What we built

I built a Power BI solution that connected directly to the underlying data sources and refreshed automatically. The leadership team could open a dashboard each morning and see yesterday's contact volumes, first-time resolution rates, channel breakdown and team performance. No waiting. No manual exports. No spreadsheet someone had to remember to update.

We built it with proper data modelling at the back end, so the numbers were consistent and trustworthy. We included filters for date ranges, contact type and service area, so different managers could look at the view relevant to their team without needing a different report for each one. We also built it to be simple - the most common failure mode for dashboards is trying to show everything.

The results

First-time resolution rates improved by 15%. Follow-up correspondence dropped by 50%.

I want to be clear that Power BI did not achieve those outcomes on its own. The data made it visible to the right people at the right time, which allowed them to make better decisions about staffing, communication and process. That is what good reporting does. It does not manage the organisation for you. It gives the people doing that job much better information to work with.

What this means for your organisation

If you work in local government, the NHS, housing, education or any other public sector setting, this kind of challenge is almost certainly familiar to you. Data that is technically available but practically inaccessible. Reports that tell you what happened last month rather than what is happening now.

Power BI can change that. And the investment required is much smaller than most people expect - especially when weighed against the cost of staff time spent producing manual reports, or the cost of decisions made on stale data.