Transactional website and intranet

Virtually every council in the UK now possesses a website, and to varying degrees, uses it to deliver information and services to its customer base. As the Better Connected surveys show, however, there is still considerable scope for improvement before council websites become accepted as the main channel of delivery for council information and services.

Recent figures show that 60-70% of incoming enquiries for a typical council come via the website, but up to 40% of these fail completely or partly, causing the customer to revert to more expensive contact channels and to lose confidence in online resources. Many other potential users are put off because the website is unusable on mobile phones or inaccessible to disabled groups. Often the website navigation is not optimised for the relatively small number of key transactions or enquiries in which most visitors are interested.

The savings to be made from encouraging users to access information and services directly on the web, without involving council staff or associates are considerable - at least £4 million per annum for a small council, and perhaps ten times this for a large council - and all for an investment of a few hundred thousand pounds. Yet councils in the main are failing to achieve these savings - for various reasons:

• The website is not fully transactional - perhaps it has forms for customers to complete to apply for a service, but these do not link directly to the back office systems to initiate the service

• The website remains as a sign-posting facility, rather than a direct channel of communication or services - for example, it gives telephone numbers or names to contact, rather than offering the service directly

• It fails to reflect how customers think or how they would choose to apply for the service (usually because the council hasn't bothered to find out) - so customers fnd the processes on the web confusing and difficult, and may give up or phone the council for assistance

• There is a lack of clear ownership of the website - who actually takes corporate ownership for it, reflecting the fact that the website is the outward-looking face of the council, the shop-window of the council reflecting to the world what the council stands for and seeks to offer, and is the main channel for service delivery?

• The website is written in "council-speak" rather than in words that its readers would understand better

• The information presented is what the council wants to say about itself, rather than what the customer wants to know

• The website is not well publicised - for example, more than half of councils still fail to suggest to out-of-hours callers that they try to resolve their query through the council website.