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Digital Services Workstream

Our citizens expect our services to be online and available on any device. Accessing our services should be as straight forward as online shopping. When our citizens choose to use the phone, we will offer them the same quality of service.

We’ll work to better understand our users’ needs and how our services are provided to ensure they have a seamless experience of our services. This will reduce the demand on our customer service teams and departmental staff and improve the experience for visitors, residents and businesses.

Outcomes

  • The majority of our residents’ interactions with us will be online (at least two thirds)

  • We have a thorough understanding of how our residents, businesses, partners and visitors interact with our services so that we can improve outcomes for them

  • Users can understand our website so that they do not need to contact us if we have put the information online

  • People get what they want first time in 80% of our interactions with residents, whether for information or transactional services, without needing help

  • Our staff spend more of their time delivering services to our customers and less time on administration

  • We can get insights from the data about our services to help us be more efficient and effective

  • Our residents, businesses and visitors are aware of our activities and trust us, because we communicate effectively via email and social media

  • We reduce the amount of paper and carbon we use and switch to digital solutions where possible to reduce costs and our impact on the environment

  • Our staff can find the information they need about the council quickly and easily on a new intranet

  • We can evidence our plans and progress in line with our statutory duty for local government performance improvement reporting and don’t need to capture this data as a separate manual process

  • We are regarded as a leading digital council.

Actions

  • Review the alignment of our customer service functions to ensure that we are keeping our customers at the heart of what we do

  • Clearly understand the telephone calls that come into the council including the routes taken, volume, nature of enquiries, and the outcomes for customers

  • Create a directory of our services to ensure everyone has a common understanding of how our services are delivered, and the people and technology involved, giving us the data to prioritise our digital efforts

  • Develop service process maps of all our services to gain a consistent understanding of the costs, and the staff and customer experience

  • Develop a user panel of residents and businesses to collaborate with us as we improve our services, and act as digital champions within our communities

  • Carry out user research, observe our citizens’ consumer habits and preferences, and gather feedback from our residents to understand what they need from us and use the findings to inform our priorities

  • Create, train, and support multi-functional digital teams with the skills to build and improve the services we offer online

  • Support everyone in our organisation to use the data they have about their service, to understand and suggest where improvements could be made

  • Establish a governance mechanism that allows us to prioritise our digital efforts while empowering our teams to improve their services

  • Work in small, clearly defined, increments rather than big bang projects

  • Regularly and transparently review our progress and share our learning with our members, senior leaders, staff and stakeholders

  • Review the content on our website as we improve each of our services, removing content that is underused or not focused on residents’ needs

  • Introduce an email marketing tool and standardised approach to email marketing across our services and in our planned communications to increase engagement and trust in our online services

  • Introduce a social media management tool to streamline our publishing and response to enquiries

  • Integrate social media enquiries into our customer service functions

  • Review all processes where items are printed to ensure that we only use expensive print resources where it is absolutely necessary

  • Review the journeys we take in getting to and conducting our work, so that we actively reduce the carbon we use in line with our environmental commitments

  • Introduce a standardised approach to online consultation and engagement to help our users' voices be heard and enable us to respond to their needs.