Customer Access Improvement Service Briefing Issue 3

Produced by: Socitm Insight

Type: Briefings

The briefing covers findings from the last six months of Website take-up service and also from the Channel value benchmarking and GovMetric services. As such if provides a broad view of takeup, satisfaction and other issues across the three key customer access channels – web, phone and face-to-face.

We describe how the second group of Channel value benchmarking participants benchmarked their costs and performance across all access channels and headline findings.

Next, we present high level information from GovMetric about satisfaction and take-up for the three major channels.

The rest of the briefing focuses on the latest results about usage of and satisfaction with the web channel from the Website take-up service.

In our last issue we focused on the measurement of avoidable contact on the web that can be fed into local authority returns for the mandatory NI 14 indicator in England. We also reported on a summary of current progress with the use of digital TV to support local public services.

In this issue we focus on the worsening problem of websites failing to deliver what visitors want to achieve as the purpose of their visits.

However we also highlight the case of one council that has been successful in avoiding this problem by improving its site after responding to evidence collected by both GovMetric and the Website take-up service.

South Tyneside Council took a series of actions to improve the website based on the customer feedback it received through these services, having also spotted from the usage data a trend in its refuse and recycling services away from the website to the phone channel. The Council improved the relevant web pages, then actively promoted them to customers, achieving significant channel shift, increased visitor satisfaction and reduced costs.

Last modified: 21st January 2010