Fife Council break DITV access records due to bad weather

Council's digital interactive TV service takes pressure off as parents access school closure information via TV.

Fife Council has published services on digital interactive TV and mobile via Looking Local for over three years but the service came into its own in early January when Fife - as with most of the country - was covered in snow.

Fife's usage is primarily driven by the services they offer on Looking Local, importantly they give real time access to their most used databases; road/traffic updates, facility closures, bin collections dates, A-Z, school closures and local news. This means they manage the data once for all their channels and all their audiences, whether on DiTV, the website, mobile, visitors in person and call centre callers get equal access to the latest information.

In early January when the country was plagued by heavy snow falls parents needed immediate access as to whether the local schools were going to open and if not how to manage childcare. In this week alone Fife's Looking Local TV service logged 7,137 sessions (over 21,000 hits) on their school closures pages.

This example in itself has given Fife reason to offer Looking Local's DiTV and mobile service, redirecting over 7,000 enquiries to a self service channel at a peak time. In that Looking Local's research shows that most DiTV users would otherwise contact the council by phone, and based on SOCITM Insight 2008 channel benchmark figure of £3.22 per phone call, this was a saving of over £22,500 in one week alone.