Customer-centric view of the Council of the Future

Putting the customer at the heart of your strategy for becoming the Council of the Future is absolutely vital.

So is getting your website right. The web, in tomorrow's public service, will be the key channel for communication and service delivery. Not for everyone, but for the majority of people and the overwhelming majority of transactions between the Council and its customers. If you are not already achieving figures of 50% and over for the proportion of information enquiries and service deliveries delivered over the web, then something is wrong. You are spending too much on staffing contact centres, individual receptions, and customer facing staff scattered through the organisation.

Not getting your website right means getting your business wrong. In these times of challenge, the limited resources available need to be doing the right things.

But getting your website right isn’t easy; it means doing things differently. People will have to change the way they work and customers will have to be persuaded (and enabled) to deal with you differently. The web can’t do everything. Around half the visitors to local authority websites are only seeking information. They are well aware that if they can’t find the information they want, they can make a phone call or write a letter or send an email. It’s a mark of failure if someone has tried and failed to get some information which should be readily available on the website. At best the visitor decides to abandon the search and the council’s reputation is diminished. Costs that should have been pennies for a web visit become pounds when council staff have to find what the web failed to deliver. Having an overly large super-efficient call-centre is an indication of failure.

The web is a brutal task-master. If it doesn’t work really well then people won’t use it. They would rather sit in a telephone queue waiting to waste your money than bear the frustration of trying to make sense of your website. There’s more to gain from getting your website right than more satisfied customers. Getting it right means that
you will do things better than you did before and doing things better means that you really will do more for less!

Download our leaflet which gives you more insight into how to make your website work for you...