Philip

Challenge

Financial pressures compelled the council to reduce avoidable contact coming into the organisation. I was part of the team tasked with delivering the solution. The real problem was that no-one knew where to focus our attention first.

No part of the process was simple. Customer services kept unreliable paper tallies of the number of customers who came in and what they came in for, which were manually input into a spreadsheet at the end of the week.

There were multiple separate telephony services in the building, so it was not possible to trace how many calls had been received into the building, or how many had been transferred internally.

The website was better, with good analytical data, but we still couldn’t tell whether any given visit resulted in a successful outcome, or whether the customer needed to call or visit us as a result.

Action

I designed and developed a simple to use web app for capturing visitor information in reception.

For the website we already had volumes, but no measure of customer satisfaction. I designed and developed a light-weight feedback form that could be deployed on every page of the site and capture the precise information that we needed. We did some A/B testing with a small sample and launched the preferred solution.

There are many stakeholders, internally and externally, when it comes to Local Authority service provision. The planning application pages were the most visited on the site by a wide margin, so I interviewed members of the planning team to scope their requirements. It turns out that their main external contact is with local architects, so I interviewed several of them to understand their needs with regards to council services.

We organised a series of four workshops for staff to keep everyone up to speed and gain buy-in internally. With fifty people at each workshop, we had a great opportunity to perform card-sorting exercises, where we asked staff to categorise services under different headings.

Output

With large amounts of data now at our fingertips it was now clear where the low-hanging fruit were.

The single most requested piece of information across all channels was "What bins do I put out?"

I designed and developed a public-facing web app that tells you what bins to put out on what day, based on your address.

The website was verbose and labyrinthine. Working closely with departments I helped halve the number of pages, by heavily editing the copy and introducing new space-saving UI elements.

Finally we re-architectured the site to focus on the new transactional structure uncovered during the staff sessions. All services were categorised under the banners of Pay, Report, Apply and View. Popular content was prioritised at every level, as were services that were not getting the attention they deserved.

Outcome

The bin collection app was a huge success, with lots of positive feedback and more than a third of residents making use of it. Bin collection queries fell correspondingly across all other channels.

Feedback about the streamlined web content was also positive, with a noticeable drop in short visits to reception across all departments.

Website usage started to climb, several percentage points week-on-week.