Agenda item

The Community Access Strategy sets out Brent’s vision for transforming the way in which residents are able to access information, advice and services. This report provides Scrutiny Members with a summary of the Community Access Strategy agreed by Cabinet on 15 October 2014 and the progress that has been made in implementing this.

Margaret Read (the Council’s Director of Customer Services) introduced the report which provided the Committee with an update on the progress of the Community Access Strategy since it was agreed by Cabinet in October 2014. She stated that the strategy had been driven by the following four key aims:

            (i)         Improving residents’ experience;

(ii)        Redesigning access arrangements to meet differing needs of   residents;

(iii)       Extending and improving services available on line to increase self-service; and

(iv)       Making access arrangements more efficient, eliminating duplication and better managing customer demand.

The Committee heard some of the key achievements in relation to these aims. One of the most successful aspects of the Community Access Strategy had been the digital ‘My Account’ service, which allowed residents to access a host of different Council services online. It was noted that 54,000 residents had created an account and that there were future plans to incorporate ten additional Council services onto the online platform by the end of 2017. Margaret Read also outlined that this had contributed to a significant reduction in calls received from 3 million to 1.8 million. It was also noted that published telephone numbers on the Council’s website had been successfully reduced in order to allow residents to have a more direct route to the services that they were looking for. Progress had also been made in redesigning the Customer Services Centre with a more effective integrated triage system to again lead residents more efficiently to the correct service area. Overall, this had allowed the Council to make an annual saving of £1.5 million.

Margaret Read also discussed next steps in the strategy in addition to the ten services being incorporated into the ‘My Account’ system. This included reviewing and re-launching Brent’s customer promise plus a new customer promise score card which would measure performance against published standards. The Committee heard that the Community Access Team had worked closely with the Human Resources Team to ensure that a resident focus was ingrained within the organisation going forward. This had involved talking to commercial brands such as John Lewis on their techniques for instilling a resident focus in new staff through recruitment, training and performance management.  She also mentioned that customer satisfaction would be benchmarked across a number of indicators across all service channels and that a tool kit was being developed for managers on the best methods of incorporating resident feedback into future service planning.

Members noted the strategy’s aim to ensure more residents were self-sufficient in using online services, however a point was raised that there remained a lot of residents who weren’t confident using online services for all elements of customer experience and would still rely on telephone services being available. Margaret Read acknowledged that Brent residents had different needs and that this was factored into service planning under the second aim of the strategy. She stated that, at present, there were no plans to cut off any existing communications channels but emphasised that the Council would need to consider ultimately what its channel shift plans should look like going forward. This was particularly prominent because of the ongoing financial pressures facing the Council.

In addition, questions arose on the use of interactive voice response (IVR) telephone handling on the Council’s switchboard and how effective this system had been in recognising the wide variety of different accents within the Borough. Margaret Read responded saying that IVR was an effective tool because of the high volume of calls which were successfully routed within human intervention. She outlined that it would be extremely difficult to have staff answer these calls without impacting on overall answer rates because of the sheer number of calls received. The Committee heard that around 80% of calls to the switchboard were directly routed to the correct team that the customer wanted to speak to. This suggested that the system was working effectively. She also emphasised that it was actually possible to train the IVR technology to be receptive to different accents, which the Council had taken into account. If Members have experienced any issues or residents have reported issues to them, it was specified that these can be reported to serviceImprovementteam@brent.gov.uk and they would be investigated with a view to improving recognition rates. Members were also asked to note that if a call was correctly routed but the staff member did not answer the phone, this was a telephone cover issue rather than an automated switchboard issue. Margaret Read said that the re-launch of the Customer Promise principles was aimed at helping to improving answer rates and residents’ experience when they contact the Council.

A Member of the Committee also questioned what was planned to improve the Council’s email response time to residents. Margaret Read stated that the Council had sought to address this in a number of ways with a key point being to rationalise the number of email inboxes. She also added that the generic customer services email inbox, which a lot of residents used to email the Council, was currently very inefficient as trained customer service staff had had the time consuming task of filtering through a high volume of emails to ensure they were being sent to the correct teams. Margaret Read outlined that ideally the Council would want to move to a model of online forms with drop down menus relating to different service areas which residents could use to raise issues. Once submitted, this form would then land in the correct inbox relating to the resident’s issue to be dealt with more quickly and efficiently.

The Chair questioned whether the Community Access Strategy had taken into account ‘ghosting’ as a technique of testing how accessible different Council services were. He outlined that this process involved following a real-life journey of a service user through the different parts of the Council’s system which related to them and identifying any access problems along the way. Margaret Read said that the Council still tended to use ‘mystery shopping’ to test service access but that the team would be very interested in understanding more about how it could be utilised.

RESOLVED that:

(i)         The progress being made in implementing the aims of the Community Access Strategy be noted;

(ii)        The creation of a new Digital Board to oversee the development of a new Council wide Digital Strategy be noted; and

(iii)       The Community Access Team liaise with relevant contacts at the Salvation Army for more information about ‘ghosting’ in and the role it could play in designing service access pathways.