Channel shift in a box - see it at the Socitm Conference
Channel shift is a key focus of Wednesday’s Socitm Spring Conference. But if services are to be ‘digital by default’, then council websites really have to start delivering for customers. The trouble is - most don’t at the moment, and are based on architectures and technologies that make maintenance laborious and redevelopment prohibitively expensive.
We at Socitm Consulting have a solution that may sound too good to be true, but isn’t. We’ve taken the best practice identified by our years of research into council websites and developed a complete approach to channel migration which will deliver the channel shift you need to make significant savings in the council budget. A key element of this is our ‘website-in-a-box’ – a standard, configurable website suitable for most local authorities and which contains all the functionality needed to deliver the most frequently used online council services. Importantly, it can be implemented rapidly and cheaply, and requires minimal on-going support.
Based on open source technology, our ‘website-in-a-box’ incorporates an information architecture designed specifically for councils. Following best practice, it focuses on providing intuitive customer journeys through the most frequent customer tasks plus a sensible search facility. Distilling the experience of ten years of Better Connected surveys, and using the combined expertise of Socitm Insight researchers and Socitm Consulting web strategists/developers, it will enable your authority to make channel shift and its associated cost-savings a reality – fast, and at low cost.
We are not offering ‘smoke and mirrors’ but a pragmatic solution to getting customers online whilst at the same time reducing internal costs. For example, even for a large metropolitan council, technical support for the website need involve no more than one person, and content management just one or two; small district councils will require only a fraction of a person to do the job.
Getting the website right for channel shift is probably the most important challenge you face, and we can show you a uniquely fast and cost-effective way of achieving it. I look forward to seeing you at the conference, but if you’d like to discuss any aspect of this over the phone, please reply to this email or call me on 0845 241 2774.