Local Government Customer Service Poll

Last week I ran a poll on LinkedIn. I asked the question of when dealing with a local authority (LA), “Would you rather complete a paper form with a 24hr yes/no response or an online form that took 3/4 weeks for a response?”

It was deliberately awkward and provocative to make anyone answering the poll think about what is most important to them. Is it the ease of using a digital service which many LA’s now offer, or the speed of having that service delivered?

In a utopian society then I think all would say that online and 24hr response would be the ideal, but I deliberately left that one off.

The results were weirdly remarkably close to Brexit, with 53% of respondents preferring a paper form with a 24hr response. Leaving 47% of respondents wanting an online service regardless of this taking longer.

The result surprised me, but only because I expected the paper element to score higher. At one point it was a 60/40 split, but online caught up in the final few days. But what does this result tell us about the way council’s deliver their services?

What it means is that for most people, the speed at which the service is delivered to them is more important than the access channel. To get a quicker turnaround, they would happily fill in a paper form. This probably goes against the ‘digital by default’ approach that many councils have taken.

What I did not add to the question, was whether the service being required was urgent. If I had, then we can assume that the response time answer would have seen an increase. So, for someone who is facing being made homeless, or needing to apply for housing benefit then the response time is everything.

Interestingly in the comments, there was the point that for Planning Permission, people expect to wait at least 3-4 weeks. For most applicants, the maximum time for a response is 8 weeks. Therefore, ease of access is likely to be the important factor, if the service continues at that slow a pace.

One factor we do need to bear in mind, is that I work in digital services, and therefore a vast majority of my connections on LinkedIn also do. Without embarrassing anyone, I can see who voted which way and there were many who voted for online, that work in that field.

I am not saying they were wrong, every vote is valid, but if your job is to deliver online services then the likelihood is that you will vote for it. Irrespective of that, I think it is still interesting that the majority take speed of service over ease of access and that is ultimately where a lot of councils are going wrong.

What is my take on this?

The focus for the last few years has all been about the front end. Delivering online services. I have seen councils migrate their online forms to a new package and there has been over 200 of them in some instances. There seems to be a form for everything, and yet in many cases the service behind the form is still the same as it was. The element of bringing a service online has taken little to no work off the back office.

If I can use my own example, then recently I moved house. I stayed within my local authority. Despite filling in the online house move form and subsequently two complaint forms, it still took two and half months to process the move. At no point have I had any acknowledgement of the delay, I was not updated at any time and my complaints have never been responded to. So, does the online element make any difference at all? It was quite simple for me, despite being overly lengthy, but the service behind it was rubbish and meant I had bills to the wrong address, my landlord got bills and it was a mess. Similarly, I’ve also recently renewed my parking permit. Despite being online and quite easy to do, a week later I still have a note in my car saying awaiting arrival of new permit, hoping not to get a ticket.

If you are going to spend the money designing forms for residents to give them services “so good they choose to use them”, then the key to delivering this is redesigning the back office processes.

So, for openness here, that phrase is one of my pet hates. It sits alongside ‘Digital by Default’ and ‘Delivering the Amazon experience to our customers’. Ironically, I’m listening to a webinar right now, where all three have been used! It is painful on the ears.

The least favourite is the Amazon comparison, and that is actually what started this poll in the first place. I buy from Amazon for two reasons, the first is that the price is good. That is important, but the key one is that whatever I buy is delivered to me the next day. The Amazon experience is not about the fact it is a MyAccount, the experience is that what I want is delivered very quickly. If Amazon took 3-4 weeks to deliver, then I would not use them. I would probably walk to my local shops. I appreciate that there is a large element of laziness here, but that is true of many people. I want cheap, I want quick, and I do not want to have to make much effort.

Compare that to council services. I will remove cheap, as this is not a competitive environment. There is only one supplier. Fast and little effort is where I value a council service. Waiting 2.5 months for a change of address does not work for me. Waiting over a week for a parking permit does not work for me.

Where the online service needs to deliver is not just on ease of access for me, but also to bring me the right result and quickly. There is no reason why many processes cannot be automated. A parking permit should be fully automated and in the post to me the same day as I pay for it. It was a renewal, not a new application. This renewal should have been expected, although a reminder may have been nice. Similarly, a change of address is very straightforward.

If anyone has experienced the Business banking world then you will know how much easier the new breed of financial institutions such as Starling and Tide make the process over some of the legacy banks. Tide took me under 15 minutes to open a business account. To open a second account with them took under a minute. Compare that to HSBC that took weeks, and to get an online account relied on me downloading a pdf and posting it to them. Then being sent a secure card and having to go online to set the account up, before being able to use a phone app. In a competitive environment there is only one winner here. Tide scanned my passport, it took a photo of me, it called all my company details from Companies House with an api. It really was seamless.

You may think this is different to a council, but look at it again and ask yourself who did all the work here? The answer is that I did. Tide actually did nothing, at least not manually.

Look again at my council tax move. Many of you reading this will know that despite me sending all the information in online, the move was only actioned when a council officer manually updated the system. And that is where many LA online services fall down. It is what is stopping the one-day online service. It is likely that although I completed the form online that the vast majority for the work was completed by an officer. Perhaps 20% was me, and 80% was the officer.

If you take Housing Benefit as a service, it is where I cut my teeth in local government, then you will see a very manual service. Teams of assessors manually inputting information. Most departments have a constant backlog, 8 weeks can easily go by without a response. And yet many councils have a housing benefit online service. The shift here needs to focus on the service behind the service.

We need to move from a manually intensive service to one where the customer does all the work. If I am submitting all my information online, then anything I enter should go directly into the system and update in real time. The role of the Assessor then becomes one of a QA role rather than a manual assessment role. For those worried about fraud, then a) HB fraud levels are quite low and b) you just check more claims than the current 4% and 10% levels specified. There are many mistakes made in HB claims by Assessors anyway, believe me I used to QA them, which means that flipping the service on its head is easily achievable. Delivering Affordable and excellent service will ultimately mean that the resident is responsible for doing most of the work. The resident needs to be doing 80% of the work and the council the remaining 20%. That’s how to deliver true online excellent services.

What about those who cannot serve online? Well, hopefully you are creating capacity in teams to deal with the most vulnerable. I have a previous blog on the 80/20 split of low need / high need residents that you can read. In a nutshell, you are spending 80% of your budgets on 20% of the population of your area and as such this is where you offline services need to focus. 

When you write a Customer Service strategy that states that you want to deliver excellent services, then just take a step back and think about what this means. As I have shown in the poll, to 53% of residents this means speed of service. To 47% this means ease of access. Redesign the end-to-end service with a focus on how quickly the customer gets a response. Automate as much as possible, even if this is normal in your service. Balance this with how much of the work you can pass back to the customer to do.

As Andrew Grant, ex-CEO of AVDC, still says today, there should be an algorithm to approve certain types of planning permission. This means same day planning permission is a distinct possibility. That is an Amazon style delivery. Unfortunately, people have got used to this being at least a six-week process in most cases and therefore expectations are low.  They do not need to be. Having a slick online submission portal is undone by the delays in the service. This can be remedied quite easily. Again, we must apply some sense here and probably an 80/20 split as not every application is straightforward.

Transactional services should all be automated, that is straightforward enough and hopefully goes without saying. Other services will take some thought, but nothing is impossible.

What can we take from this poll ?

Split out your audiences. You know that you have an 80/20 split of Low need vs High need, you also have a split of those who want speed over ease. Design services ‘so good that residents choose to use them’ by giving them both. Make the resident do the heavy lifting where they can and automate as much of the back office as you can. Move to a QA service rather than a manual one. It is no different to any other industry that is following this model. Residents will be used to booking holidays, having their own boarding cards, buying train tickets, self-serve in supermarkets. It is about applying this theory to your own services. Customer service and customer services are two different things and for now customer service is what needs the attention. It may need a complete service redesign, and councils to work together, but the technology is out there to make this a reality.

 

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