Birmingham City Council Citizen Access Strategy
The aim of this strategy is to set out Birmingham’s vision to improve citizen’s experience when they access services, information or advice from the City Council. It builds on the work already undertaken in the One Contact programme and seeks to create modern and appropriate access arrangements that meet the needs of the differing demographic groups living in Birmingham.
The private sector responsiveness to demands for ease of access and swift decision making has increased citizen’s expectations of local government services across all channels from face to face to online service delivery. People can do their banking online so they expect to apply for or have access to information on their council services in the same way. At the same time there is a requirement to meet the needs of those who do not have access to online services and currently need to access services via the telephone or face to face.
Consultation has taken place with Directorates across the council and corporate groups such as EMCB which has helped to further refine the final strategy document. It should be noted there are linkages between the Future Council Project (understanding which opportunities change the way citizens access services and providing the platform to accommodate these) and ISS (defining how citizen information is shared, analysed and utilised to inform service design and delivery) and the work that will support the delivery of this strategy. There are also clear links between the ICT & Digital Strategy and the Citizen Access Strategy.
Central to the approach will be the development of more joined up services that will be designed from a citizen’s perspective and adheres to the council values. This should support other initiatives such as demand reduction and where possible consider sharing the burden with partners. It will need to drive or support cashable savings and efficiencies within Council services by consolidating and in some cases centralising access arrangements, while at the same time simplifying arrangements for citizens to access council services.
The Customer first strategy no longer addresses the current requirements of citizens whose expectations and use of technology particularly mobile has increased significantly. It also does not fully address the capacity to achieve efficiencies from fully integrated end to end reviews.
There is a desire to deliver a new Universal business Service – a single point of contact and on-line services for businesses to transact with the council, so access to services for businesses are included in this strategy.
Depending on the scale of the recommendations, further project capacity may be required to implement changes and where this is the case separate business cases will be developed as appropriate to support this.
The objectives of the strategy (and associated values) are to:
• Develop citizen access arrangements that are designed to meet the differing needs of our citizens, focused on the citizen, not internal service boundaries and proactively sharing information to eliminate the need for it to be provided multiple times. (Putting Residents First)
• Develop a consistent, dynamic and excellent experience for our citizens whenever and however they contact us, building in continuous flexible change made rapidly in a controlled manner (Achieving Excellence)
• Improve the efficiency of citizen access arrangements by reducing failure demand – designing service delivery to get it right first time, every time so as to , remove duplication and failure and prevent demand arising in the first place (Being True to our Word)
• Develop an improved digital offer, better citizen confidence in digital access channels and significantly increase take up and use of digital access channels (Achieving Excellence)
• Reduce demand by changing the relationship with citizens so that those that are able do more for themselves (Acting Courageously)
• Sharing the burden of access and delivery with partners (Acting Courageously)
The key principles underpinning the strategy are:
1. Use of quality evidence including citizen insight for decision making
2. Greater engagement and empowerment of citizens
3. Citizens should help themselves wherever possible and reasonable
4. Investment in expertise and skill building, right people in right place doing the right job
5. Sharing of personal information across services, reducing the need for citizens to provide the same information more than once
6. Not constrained by service boundaries and not expect citizens to have to navigate the Council’s organisation structure
7. Closer collaboration with the private and third sectors including learning from
8. Customer service is about the contact and outcomes e.g. end to end service delivery not the initial contact and request
Background
The transfer of the contact centre to BCC in November 2014 in support of the One Contact Programme achieved significant savings while increasing citizen satisfaction levels with the service received from the contact centre. However citizen satisfaction with service delivery or with the contact centre is not yet at desired levels and the actions that support this Citizen Access Strategy seek to redress this.
The table below outlines the savings achieved in the One Contact programme.
Citizen Expectations
Technological advances – including smartphones and apps – have opened up new frontiers of convenience, speed, and transparency in the private-sector customer experience. These allow customers to use their mobile devices to conduct a variety of complex business interactions at the time and place of their choosing, whether purchasing products, downloading a train ticket or conducting banking transactions. Complex or slow processes impact on the citizen’s experience and satisfaction. This can be seen in the findings of the Customer Service Institute which show the level of satisfaction with local government services at 60.9 compared to an average of 76 across all sectors.
They have also found that customer satisfaction is clearly linked to trust. Public Services (Local) organisations that score higher in UKCSI are more trusted by the people who use them, underlining the importance of service delivery in building and sustaining trust and reputation.[1]
The graph below outlines organisation ranking at January 2015.
Complaint findings and feedback from customer satisfaction surveys show that citizens are dissatisfied with slow speed of service and the complexity of processes.
Impact of not Meeting Citizen Expectations
The graph below shows the decrease in overall Citizen Satisfaction with the way BCC is running things has dropped from 80.74% in June 2012 to 66.57% in March 2014.
[2] / Least SatisfiedExtremely income deprived (52.0%)
Living in high-rise flat (53.6%)
High deprivation [10th decile] (57.1%)
Greatest decline
Active elderly people living in pleasant retirement locations (-26.8%)
Successful professionals living in suburban or semi-rural homes (-21.6%)
This has a direct impact on the council’s reputation with citizens and also their level of trust in our ability to meet their needs.
Birmingham’s Response to the challenge
We need to adopt a citizen-centric approach to designing service delivery which provides fast, simple, and efficient processes, including the availability of comprehensive online services and the transparency of information to support further increases in citizen satisfaction.
We need to systematically reduce errors and timeframes relating to “behind-the-scenes” processes by applying lean management practices and automation to reduce cycle times and improve quality. This should also be supported by increased transparency to citizens of how long things will take to resolve and where in the process they are.
The expectation for effective online service delivery will continue to increase in Birmingham especially as the age profile in Birmingham is much younger that elsewhere in the UK. While we should maintain a range of channels to support citizens, investment in digital channels is likely to achieve further savings and increased citizen satisfaction. Examples of where this has been successfully implemented include New York who by 2013 processed 60% of service requests online[3]
How do we meet the challenge?
The 4 action plan areas to be developed in support of the Citizen Access Strategy are:
· Citizen Insight
· Culture and Leadership – How we behave
· Service Delivery– what services we provide, where and how
· Effectiveness of End to End Service Delivery
Citizen Insight – What we know about our citizens
BCC will use data and statistical analysis to improve performance, by having strong data-driven insights about citizen satisfaction. Enabling the council to know the specific services citizens are dissatisfied with, the extent of their dissatisfaction, the factors driving it, or, importantly, what is working well and how to replicate that across other services. This data will be used to prioritise services for design and improve interventions. It will also be used to better understand citizen segmentation to tailor interventions for different types of citizens with the propensity to behave differently
Culture and Leadership – How we behave
Skills
The table below outlines the key drivers of citizen satisfaction across public services as identified by Ipsos Mori. We need to develop and hone the skills and behaviours that support the drivers of satisfaction.
[4]
As is evident from the above table the ownership of customer service does not only sit with those who interact with the citizen but should be across the whole organisation. The values and behaviours ‘how we do things around here’, how we work together to ensure good outcomes for citizens and how we deliver services include keeping to our promises and speed of delivery both of which have a major impact on citizen satisfaction.
Service Delivery – what services we provide, where and how
Reviews that fully incorporate end to end service delivery should be used to set out the changes that will need to be made to transform our contact arrangements. It will drive our approach to ‘online service delivery’ by setting out how we will ensure more interactive transactions and information are available online 24:7, how we will support and encourage more people to use the web and how we will maintain or improve telephone and face to face interactions for those with the most complex needs.
The prioritisation of services for End to End Review will be considered against the 4 CASE areas below. Changes to arrangements for the delivery of these services are likely to have the greatest impact on citizen satisfaction levels.
Current performance baseline: how well the service is meeting citizens’ needs today and whether the standard achieved is required / can be afforded
Achievability: how readily and easily we can make changes to the service, making it easier should also reduce the cost of change
Significance: the importance of a service to citizens’ overall satisfaction
Extent: the number of citizens who benefit from a service and any future plans which will impact on those numbers by increasing or decreasing
Reviews will consider how the service could be most effectively delivered online, the management of telephone contact to maximise efficiencies and improve customer experience, the use of partners to support service delivery and how we meet the needs of our more vulnerable citizens.
Effectiveness of End to End Service Delivery
Reviews will consider a citizen’s end-to-end “journey” through a process (such as housing repair) rather than the individual “touch-points” for example reporting the repair or carrying out the work to fix the repair. They will need to consider the impact that changing service delivery will have on access. This will support more effective ways to collaborate internally across functions to deliver services.
External resource will be required to support the development of skills within BCC to undertake end-to-end reviews.
These improvement initiatives will identify activity to be simplified making the activity more straightforward across all access channels such as online, telephone and face to face. They will involve citizens in identifying the design that simplifies the service and all the while, measure citizen satisfaction levels to track whether the changes are actually working. Options for this include the use of a citizen panel to obtain feedback on their experience using services and accessing information and how they meet their requirements. Reviews will also be used to identify any potential for co-design with partners such as the 3rd sector and businesses.
There are some processes that are cumbersome for citizens because we require them to know how the City is organised. That should not be an issue for the citizen – they should simply have to report the issue e.g. fallen tree and not be expected to know or care whether it is on Highways, Parks or Housing land – we should simply deal with the issue of ownership behind the scenes.
Reviews will also benchmarking consistently against peers to identify areas of good practice and learn from them.
We must remember that this necessitates the willingness to try things that haven’t been tried before, and to quickly abandon what doesn’t work or is inefficient.
In order to make these changes quickly and easily, we will need agile flexible technology, appropriate governance that enables quick decision making and the ability to do more for ourselves so that we are not reliant on third parties all the time. It will also mean building in a culture of continuous improvement where all staff are continually looking for opportunities to improve the way services are deliver, and harnessing MI to help identify and build the case for change
Where services are not included in early reviews there is a need to develop some overriding principles for other areas of the Council to follow when delivering or reviewing their own services.
Also number of standards for dealing with telephone calls, responding to email and written queries needs to be consistently set across the council which includes services to ‘internal customers’ colleagues and members.
Digital Inclusion
There is a need to support the enablement of access to digital channels for citizens who may not have the skills or access to technology. Deprivation levels in Birmingham are very high and many citizens do not have English as a first language.
· 24% live in the top 5% most deprived nationally (142K people)
· 40% population live in 10% most deprived nationally (430K people)
· 9th Birmingham is ranked 9th most deprived Local Authority in England out of 354