TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION
Delivering citizen centred savings with digital
Hugo Pickford-Wardle, chief innovation officer at digital consultancy Matter, talks about the growing importance of digital in the public sector and delivering savings for local authorities and their citizens.
L
ocal and central government are migrating services to digital channels in an effort to improve service provision for citizens and – just as importantly in the current economic climate – to deliver cost savings.
Throughout the public sector, services have been reliant on expensive, ‘call-centred’ service delivery, but this is becoming increasingly outdated – offering both poor delivery and return on investment.
In addition, an increasingly tech-savvy population is beginning to expect its interactions with government agencies to match the simple, efficient, end-to-end service delivery it experiences as customers in the private sector.
Citizen centred savings
Digital consultancy Matter has developed a white paper that explores key digital trends already making a real difference in both local and central government. Hugo Pickford- Wardle, chief innovation officer at the company, told PSE that the most important trend is ‘citizen centred savings’.
However, Matter’s report highlights that there continues to be a “general lack of understanding of how digital models of public service design can deliver agile, easy-to-use, consumerised services at a lower cost”.
But there is a school of thought that suggests service-user led and stakeholder projects will ‘democratise’ public digital services and spaces.
For instance, it has been suggested that citizen input will increasingly migrate online in the form of social-networks and forums, which allow citizens to become architects of public service-style provision.
52 | public sector executive Oct/Nov 14
Pickford-Wardle said: “There is obviously a lot of talk about the savings that need to be made in government, but also an assumption that this leads to a reduction in services and a worse situation.
“What we see with this trend is an opportunity to use a change in the actual customer experience – based on the technology available and with a different metaphor for how you’re interacting with customers.”
An example of this in action is with Casserole Club, a volunteer-based public service relying on an online platform, where volunteers register to share extra portions of home-cooked food with people in their area – a sort of Big Society meals-on-wheels.
The project was launched after a successful pilot in which more than 200 plates of food were shared in the Reigate and Banstead areas in Surrey. Casserole is supported by a website and carried on the futuregov platform, which allows authorities to access it and implement it.
“It means there is a better outcome – even though there has to be a change in the way that services are funded because of the financial landscape,” said Pickford-Wardle. “It is one of the biggest challenges: trying to match up the financial landscape with the expectation of customers. I believe matching these will be vital.
“Digital provides a way of creating low-cost touch points, which you can use to create new experiences that a citizen is going to have. A big part of this is about validated channel shift, which is one of the other trends.”
Validated channel shift The white paper revealed that self-serving
customers are ‘cheaper’ to provide for than those who use telephone or face-to-face services. According to Harvard
Business
Review, over 50% of call centre customers have already visited the website that relates to the service they are calling about. Increasingly, investment will be made in promoting channel shift – but that shift alone will not provide ROI unless migration is retained.
The key to channel shift is ‘stickiness’; creating online service delivery platforms that are efficient enough to attract customers and keep them engaged in the transaction. Matter says that to create ‘sticky’ solutions and control costs, service upgrades will be delivered incrementally through tested and trialled programmes.
An example of this was when Birmingham City Council worked with Matter to create a bespoke online system for businesses applying for funding from the Urban Broadband Fund, part of the government’s Super Connected Cities programme.
Originally, the process was paper-based and time consuming, but through testing and diagnostics, the delivery team built a system that allowed the process to be completed online. Since its introduction applications have increased ten-fold.
“When we make that channel change – which doesn’t have to cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, especially if it is just a content change – it is measuring it that proves that the change has had the proven channel shift impact. And, actually, what you are focusing on is the measurement not just across the digital services, but across the calls coming into the call centre or office operation as well.
“That’s where digital can make an enormous
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76