Underperforming websites could be costing councils £11m a month
Published Friday 8th January 10
Underperforming websites could be costing UK councils collectively up to £11m a month as people unsuccessful in accessing online information and services turn instead to other, more expensive-to-service channels like the phone or walk-in contact centres.
This finding comes from data collected in September by Socitm Insight's Website Takeup service, and is published in its latest Customer Access Improvement Service briefing, published on 8 January.
Website take-up service data shows that in September 2009, 7.3m unique visitors came to the websites of the 120 local authorities (25% of all councils) that subscribe to the service. On average 21% of these visitors failed to find what they were looking for and another 21% only found part of what they were looking for.
These failure volumes equate to up to 20,000 unsatisfied visitors per month for single tier and county councils and up to 5,000 for shire districts. If these figures are extrapolated across the whole local authority sector in the UK, then nearly 4.4m enquiry failures were recorded in September. Assuming each of these web failures led to a subsequent phone call to the council at an average cost to serve of £2.50 each, the total cost of these web failures adds up to £11m in just one month.
'We have been drawing attention to the level and consequences of local authority web enquiry failures for some time' says Martin Greenwood, Programme Director for Socitm Insight. 'But this is the first time we have attempted to out a value on it. With the coming cuts in public spending, councils must invest in their web channel so that they save money through self-service, rather than adding uneccessary cost because customers can't actually do what they want to online'.
The Website take-up service, established in 2004, tracks usage of and satisfaction with council websites, using information gathered through an exit survey offered to every fifth visitor to participating councils' websites. The survey asks why visitors have come to the website, what information or services they were seeking and whether they have been able to do what they came to the website to do. It also asks how they would have contacted the council if not by the website - which is predominantly by phone.
The Website Take up service is part of the wider Customer Access Improvement Service that enables councils to measure and benchmark their performance on customer satisfaction and value for money across a range of different channels, principally web, phone and face to face. Other components of the service are GovMetric - an automated method of capturing and reporting the quality of customer interactions with a local authority across web, phone and face to face channels - and Channel value benchmarking - which helps local authorities identify and compare the total cost of providing access via web, phone and face to face channels.
Other key findings from the The Customer Access Improvement Service Half Yearly Review and Results Summary issue 3 are:
- the web is the most important customer access channel by volume of enquiries. In September 2009, 70% of customer interactions came from the website; 17% came from the telephone and 13% from face-to-face
- the web is also the least satisfactory channel: 42% of visitors rate it as poor, compared with 21% of face-to-face visitors and just 2% of callers by phone. The main reason for dissatisfaction is failure of visitors to find what they are looking for.
- the problem of failure to complete tasks on the web is getting worse, increasing by 10% in the past 12 months. Net visitor satisfaction has dropped by nearly 14%.
Copies of the briefing are available free of charge to subscribers to any component of the Customer Access Improvement Service service and to Socitm Insight subscribers. The charge for the briefing to other organisations is £50.
Press copies can be requested from the Socitm press office.
Notes for editors
The Customer Access Improvement Service is a marketing partnership formed by Socitm Insight and rol (developers of the GovMetric service) in April 2008 to promote a comprehensive solution to measurement and performance improvement around customer access to public services.
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