OneVu - 2.14

 

The following functionality is present within the latest version of OneVu:

• Customer Service Vu Enhancements
• Northgate Landlords
• Northgate Business Rates additional data now available
• Northgate Business Improvement Districts
• eNotifications for Northgate Revenues and Benefits
• Small Things/Bug Fixes
  
  

Customer Service Vu Enhancements

The following enhancements have been provided as a part of this release where an organisation is licensed to use the Customer Service Vu (CSVu) functionality.

 

1) Create an account - national address look up

When citizens create an account with OneVu, they find their address using a national address look up.

Prior to this release, if you needed to create a customer account in Customer Service Vu, you'd need to manually free type the address.

This release builds in the same national address look up into Customer Service Vu.

 

2) Citizen Address shown when viewing their record

From this release when you load a customer their address is shown against them:

 

 

3) Search by phone number

Because people can now create an account solely using a mobile phone number, this release adds the ability to search for customers by phone number:

 

4) Open Form in a New Window Option

 

When customer service agents need to take a payment as a part of a phone call/face to face contact, it it necessary for the payment to be taken out with OneVu. 

Previously this would load the payment system in the same window as CS Vu. The problem with this is when the payment was completed and they navigated back to CS Vu, the customer details were gone and the context of the call lost. 

To solve this, in this release we've added a new option in a form's set up that means that when a form is opened in this scenario it opens in an entirely new window. This means the context of the call/customer details are not lost. 

Both this new version of OneVu 2.14 and the latest version of the forms framework 2.6 are needed for this to work. 

To enable this for a form you need to go into the details for a form you want to do this for and click on the configuration option for the environment you want to enable this:

Then set it to New Window per below:

 

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Northgate Landlords

The following enhancements have been provided as a part of this release where an organisation is licensed to use the Northgate Landlords 'Silo' functionality. 

This provides Landlords that receive Housing Benefit payments the means to:

a) Search for tenants and view claimant specific details of payments made to them and current award / status etc. 

b) View notification letters sent to them

c) View payment schedules sent to them

 

The functionality, like all integrated silos, starts with real time authentication of the landlord. The landlord is required to provide three security answers in line with the screenshot below:

 

These are used in conjunction with one another to confirm that the person accessing the service is a landlord. This first level of authentication permits the landlord to view their payment schedules, as shown below:

 

{NB - the format of payment schedules is whatever is imported from you}

 

The second function, Tenant Query, includes an additional layer of authentication. The landlord needs to provide their tenant's claim reference and the tenant's name/NINO or DOB. These two values in combination with the three values from before are used to determine:

a) Whether the landlord is the current payee and thus entitled to know about the current award etc. 

b) Whether they were previously a payee and thus only entitled to see previous payments/notifications

Where the landlord is not the current payee they are only able to see details of payments/documents previously sent to them. 

Where the landlord is the current payee they are able to see the above as well as details of the tenant's next payment amount/date, their current award, and the current status of the claim:

 

 

It is also possible, where the landlord has multiple creditor/payee references to link these using the link another account function:

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Northgate Business Rates - new data items available

The following enhancements have been provided as a part of this release where an organisation is licensed to use the Northgate Business Rates 'Silo' functionality. 

In this release we have added the following extra data items for use in the content you present to businesses about their accounts:

• Instalment plan including dates/amount etc.

• Details of all recovery for the current and previous years

• Details of special arrangements in place

 

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Northgate Business Improvement Districts 

The following enhancements have been provided as a part of this release where an organisation is licensed to use the Northgate BIDS 'Silo' functionality. 

Business Improvement Districts are areas, typically within a council, but can span more than one, where an additional tax is paid by businesses within that area.

This money is used for initiatives that regenerate/maximise economic development/growth for businesses.

The functionality includes:

a) A customisable (name and description) for businesses to select within OneVu:

b) A secure, real-time authentication mechanism that enables businesses to link / access their BIDs accounts information in seconds:

c) The means to present customers data about their BIDS accounts including:

i. ‘Quick Start content’ to enable plug in and play

 ii. All of the following data can be presented to customers dynamically based upon the account in question:

• Balance for the current year and any previous years

• Next / Last payment amounts

• Statement of transactions for the current year and any previous years

• Details of all liable parties

• Details of phone/email/contact details

• Details of whether eBilling is set up for the account

• Instalment plan including dates/amount etc.

• Method of payment inc. bank details where DD in place

• Details of any business rates relief they receive

• Details of all recovery for the current and previous years

• Details of special arrangements in place

• Documents held for an account

iii. The council has the means to control which content is shown and over how it is shown using the built in content management and conditional logic functionality. For example some councils show different warnings/information messages dynamic to the recovery stage for the account.

d) With OneVu's MyAccount functionality, the ability for a business to show Business Rates and BIDS data in a single view.

e) There is also the means to filter the bills/documents presented to businesses and give them customer friendly names.

Notes

i)the ability to present bills to customers is included with the silo but to send eNotifications requires the Broadcast module

ii) There is an additional setting IEG4 staff set for BIDS, which enables different containers for documents to be mapped as shown below:

 

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Northgate eNotifications/eBilling

The following enhancements have been provided as a part of this release where an organisation is licensed to use Broadcast (or eNotifications/eBilling in isolation). 

1) Import bills/notifications into OneVu

2) Output of a citizen preference file 

1) Import bills/notifications into OneVu

Previously, where the back office application was Northgate we would need to retrieve bills/notifications to present to a customer from your own server. I.e. You'd be responsible for both creating the bills/notifications in the correct format as well as hosting infrastructure holding all bills/notifications and ensuring the maintenance of this infrastructure. 

In this release we have upgraded each 'silo' so that you can take the bills/notifications in the correct format (i.e. you remain responsible for this) and send them (using our Bulk Import tool) automatically into the IEG4 Cloud where they're indexed against the appropriate reference. 

This is available in this release for the following Northgate integrated silos:

• Council Tax
• Benefits
• Business Rates
• Business Improvement Districts
• Landlords 

Settings for eNotifications

Within OneVu Control > Data Silos for each of the departments above is a panel called Connection Settings. There are three settings that relate to this section and the next preference file output too. An example for Council Tax is shown below:

The two that relate to hosting/controlling which documents that are presented to account holders are:

• Integration notification store configuration 
  • This is added by IEG4 - there is nothing for you to do here
• Documents Configuration
  • This JSON based setting does include content you would want to add to/change.  In here it contains a section called 'Descriptions'. This setting is the ability, for each document type that will be shown for a given department, you can indicate:
    • The document type to look for
    • The format of the name to enable indexing*
    • The user friendly name for this

So if we look at the example below:

"Descriptions": [
{
"Code": "RRV112F2",
"Prefix": "RRV112F2-{reference}",
"Description": "Council Tax Bill"
},
{
"Code": "Drv651ctrem1",
"Prefix": "Drv651ctrem1-{reference}",
"Description": "Council Tax Reminder"
},

There are two document types that might be presented to the citizen. The codes in the back office for each are RRV112F2 and Drv651ctrem1 but what the customer will see will be Council Tax Bill and Council Tax Reminder respectively. 

 

* The Prefix element is telling OneVu how to index the documents when they're imported. So any files imported for the first document type with account number 23203332 would be:

RRV112F2-23203332

 

2) Output of a citizen preference file 

The purpose of this is to enable your printers to know whether to print a bill or not without requiring any back office eBilling functionality. It contains the details of everyone registered for a given department and:

• The account number they're linked to
• The notification types 
• Whether they are opted into eBilling/eNotifications
• Whether their opt in method was Email (standard), Email (GOV.UK Notify), Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp

To se this up, within OneVu Control > Data Silos > Connection Settings there was a third setting on top of those just discussed in the last section. This is:

Notification extract file path

You simply enter the location where you want the file to be saved - the only caveats are:

• The location is in UNC format i.e. \\server\location\
• The location is accessible to the integration proxy service which is responsible for enabling communication between OneVu and the Northgate system

This allows you to set the location for a file to be output on a daily basis that contains the details of whether account holders have opted in/out of ebilling/enotifications or not. 

A file is output:

• per silo (and so the location can be different for each output file if desired)
• at the same time every day*

*The time of day is controlled by IEG4 and as such is set up as a part of your implementation of this functionality. 

The following is an excerpt from the CSV output file for Council Tax: 

 

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Small things/bug fixes

The following items have also been delivered in this release:

 

Small Enhancements

Northgate Benefits 

i) We enhanced our interpretation of the benefit data retrieved from Northgate Benefits to allow 'Apprentice' as a status. 

ii) Northgate's APIs provide two different values for Overpayment O/S amount. Before we were only mapping one of them. Now we map both:

 

Northgate Business Rates 

We enhanced the Northgate Business Rates functionality to solve issues in the Northgate API. This API is meant to provide us with the latest rateable value in chronological order of older values. However, the values are not in chronological order so was leading to perceived issues in our system. Whilst this is an API issue we enhanced our logic to work out what the API should be showing and ensure we always show the current Rateable Value. 

 

Fixes

i) Forms that were archived/deleted were previously still showing within OneVu - this has been fixed. 

ii) It was noticed that where a person was registered for a department e.g. Council Tax and registered it before eBilling was enabled. If that person re-registered with eBilling have been enabled meantime, they were automatically opted in. We have corrected this so it behaves as if they were registering for the first time and thus they can choose to opt in/out.

iii) It was noticed the timeline for CSVu and the Citizen Timeline did not show the form type completed and so this has been fixed.

iv) We fixed an issue whereby discounts/exemptions/special arrangements were not loaded or refreshed on Northgate Council Tax when there was no instalment plan on an account

v) We fixed an issue with Northgate Council Tax silo loading previously retrieved data and not resetting values that were no longer relevant e.g. old discounts are shown when no longer in back office data

vi) We fixed issues that meant some areas of OneVu could not be accessed using solely a keyboard; thus complying with WCAG 2.1 AA standards. 

vii) It was noticed that if a council had used a custom Bootstrap toggle/collapse button inside a OneVu FAQ this stopped working. We have fixed this. 

 

 

Release Version Details

The following is the release version info for the version of OneVu, which has this functionality.

 

Release Date	Version Number
26/04/2021	2.14