Future offer
"Enabling the council to be in the best possible place to determine the right operating model from 2024 onwards.”
Objective 1: Determine our future operating model
We currently have a long-standing arrangement which sees our customer service centre run by an external service provider. The contract is due for renewal in 2024. Over the period of this strategy we will evaluate how we can best deliver customer services in the future to meet the needs of our customers. To do this we will look at the entire customer journey:
- when a customer needs us
- how contact is made
- how it is picked up, triaged and handled between the customer services department and other teams across the Council
We will prioritise taking a One Council approach to make sure that everybody involved in the customer journey is measuring their performance in a way that collectively delivers the best-value experience to the customer. Sometimes this may mean spending more time with a customer on the initial call, rather than passing it on to another team. It may mean supporting the customer to self-serve by finding the information they need or completing an online form, so that next time they can help themselves at a time that suits them. It will also involve looking at the use of technology and data to make sure we organise our people, processes and systems around the needs of the customer.
As part of this customer strategy we will appraise our options for potential delivery models, by assessing all the capabilities we need to deliver customer services in the future. This will cover our:
- skills
- processes
- people
- technology
- data
In the meantime, we will continue to work collaboratively with our provider to look for opportunities to improve performance within the framework of our existing agreement.
Objective 2: Investigate opportunities for future innovation
As part of preparing for the future, we will investigate what the opportunities for innovation are. This will include utilising technologies like chatbots and automated intelligence to improve the way we do things and to meet future customer expectations.
As customers become more self-sufficient we must consider how we will deliver services in the future. We will aim to resolve issues earlier, before customers inform us. As we develop our technology and data capabilities, we will look for opportunities to experiment with how we can work more proactively within services. By being more data-driven and innovative with how services are run, we can target our resources to proactively resolve issues before they arise. This will improve customer experience and could help us reduce costs.
Objective 3: Focus on data collection to provide customer insight
Every day we collect hundreds of data points. We can utilise these to build a picture of how customers engage with us. Every phone call, written complaint, and half-completed webform is a snapshot of an individual customer’s experience. Combined, this is a bank of information that we can tap into to guide us on how we run our services.
Over the next few years we will put a strong focus on data collection. In collaboration with our data teams, we will make sure we are set up to have robust insight into customer behaviour that we can visualise and analyse to improve our services. We will supplement our own data with customer data from available market data sets to further enhance the understanding of our customer demographics and behaviour.
We will review our metrics and benchmark our performance alongside other organisations, both public and private sector. This will help us learn and will prepare us for delivering better customer services in the future.