How to understand and manage service users’ behaviour
Foreword and contents
LGC TRANSFORMATION: OUR REGULAR SPECIAL REPORT
Rachel Dalton, special report editor
Last month, the new chief executive of the LGA, Mark Lloyd, warned that further cuts to local government funding could threaten the delivery of councils’ statutory services.
In the same week, the prime minister himself became embroiled in a high-profile spat with Ian Hudspeth (Con), leader of Oxfordshire CC, about the impact of cuts on services. Mr Cameron claimed in a letter to Cllr Hudspeth that Oxfordshire could make more savings from back-office services rather than closing children’s centres. Cllr Hudspeth said Oxfordshire had already exhausted this option.
The way councils are expected to fund themselves and operate is in flux; clearly the journey is not over
The two incidents serve to demonstrate the difficulty facing local authorities. Their reputation for always balancing the books is to be commended but some believe has encouraged central government to expect ever-more impressive savings. The spending review has brought with it confirmation of the government’s plans to end revenue support grant, localise business rates and allow councils to plug the social care funding gap with a council tax precept. The way councils are expected to fund themselves and operate is in flux; clearly the journey is not over.
Councils have moved beyond cutting back-office functions.
To avoid cutting provision, their focus is now on transformation of how they respond to need. In this issue of LGC Transformation, we explore greater use of digital technology, behavioural study and demand management, and data analysis as the new tools of the trade.
Customer services
Harrow switches channels
In association with Civica: Harrow LBC has developed an online portal for its residents in a bid to cut its customer call centre costs. Nic Paton reports
Customer services
Civica logo copy
Back in 2012, Harrow LBC could proudly point to the success of its customer contact centre.
As Jonathan Milbourn, head of customer services, explains: “It was a really high quality call centre; it was the front door to all our services and taking some 120,000 calls and 15,000 emails a month.”
But he adds, tellingly: “It was a very good but very traditional customer call centre.”
Since the belt tightened on local authority finances from 2010, channel shift (or the digitisation of contact and services) has been the Holy Grail of the local government transformation agenda. But many councils have found that channel shift is easy to talk about – or worse, throw money at – but much harder to achieve in practice.
Nevertheless, Harrow LBC, through a contract with Gandlake and integration with the Civica’s Customer Contact Platform™ (CCP), has seen great results through the development of an ‘authenticated portal’ for its residents called ‘My Harrow’.
“You register for the service online and are then sent a PIN via the council tax system,” outlines Ben Jones, Harrow’s programme manager for digital services. “It is in many ways a similar model to that used by the banks.”
“The online system is designed to replicate everything offered through the call centre; otherwise you find people just keep on ringing up anyway. Anyone who wants to transact or access services online can do so,” agrees Mr Milbourn.
“We also offer access to a team of ‘web wizards’. Anyone who comes into the civic centre and wants to self-serve can be shown how to do so and how it all works.”
So, what does My Harrow offer its citizens?
“For something like council tax, you can look at your bill and your account history going back seven years. We can also send out email alerts when a council tax payment is due,” explains Mr Jones.
The online system is designed to replicate everything offered through the call centre; otherwise you find people just keep on ringing up anyway
It’s a similar story with benefits. Residents can monitor and review their benefits provision as well as access online guidance. There are portals for housing benefit and housing rent plus a landlord services portal. This, adds Mr Jones, is one area the council has now taken totally online. Residents are able to track and check things like bin collection days, local planning applications and requests to remove fly-tipping or prune back trees.
With library services, residents can see what books they have out and when they’re due back. Email alerts can be sent out on late returns or when ordered books have come in.
“School waiting lists is another area,” says Mr Jones. “What used to happen is you would get people calling up every day because they thought the more they called, the more likelihood they’d get bumped up the list, although of course it doesn’t work like that. But now you register and it’s all done online.”
The council has even begun to tackle traditionally challenging channel shift areas such as adult social care. “Adult social care is, on the face of it, quite a sensitive subject, and you often get warned off trying to come up with online solutions for it,” concedes Mr Milbourn.
“But we found quite a lot of contact tends to come from other professionals – GPs for example – and so we can give them appropriate access. Another thing we’ve found is people often simply want to find out what help is out there for their elderly parent and what they’re eligible for. So, again, it is just replicating what would have previously gone on in the call centre,” he adds.
How has all this made a difference and, crucially, has it saved the council any money?
Currently My Harrow has about 90,000 ‘live’ accounts, estimates Mr Milbourn, and about 27,000 people – roughly a third – log on every month.
“This falls roughly into line with what happens in the call centre; it is clear contact numbers tend to be driven by a relatively small number of people,” he says.
“When we look at all our self-service channels – including IVR telephony and finding information via the website – around 80% of transactions are now being done via self-service, which is up from 55-60% three to four years ago, and the number of overallcontacts continues to rise.”
This has led this year alone to a £500,000 reduction in call centre costs, with £2m being taken out of the customer services budget since 2010, says Mr Milbourn.
Finally, where is this transformation journey going next? Greater use and interrogation of data is one direction. Another is greater digitisation of letters, so reducing print and postage costs. “Much as with online banking, we can alert you that you’ve been sent a letter, and you then log in and check it,” says Mr Milbourn.
“We’re also looking at how we can better blend the account with the general website. We want it to be more like Amazon where you go into the website and then, if you want, log on to your customised account portal.
“Councils are disparate organisations that tend to work in massive silos. Digitisation gives us the chance to break down those silos. It is also about giving the customer a better experience while at the same time, because we are saving money, enabling us to continue to provide the services our more vulnerable people still need,” he adds.
DIGITAL 360 – A HOLISTIC APPROACH
Chris ginnelly
Chris Ginnelly
The digital agenda within local authorities across the UK is being driven forward by three main gears: demographics, which are changing as the online world becomes more pervasive and as young people are growing up with technology at their fingertips; the economics of digital – as many councils are seeing and documenting multimillion-pound savings, it’s now impossible to ignore the benefits of having a digital agenda; and, finally, technology itself, which is constantly evolving and enabling this shift to a truly digital service.
Although this drive is somewhat successful already, the next step is for councils to ensure they’re taking a 360° approach to their digital agenda and, as part of this, they must consider three main functions:
Capture
Councils have to know what their customers want and need – they have to capture data and information that allows them to meet their customer demand. In the past, this was inevitably achieved with a telephone call or a visit to the council office, with staff having to key the same information and data into a number of back office systems. Nowadays however, by selecting a tool which uses online digital services to capture data, they can give their customers the tools to raise, track and update service requests anytime, anywhere and on any device – be that on a PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone.
Deliver
By getting the right information and data into the line of business systems, and more importantly it being accurate and complete, the council’s delivery of services to the customers can become much more efficient and effective. Additionally, the joined up and holistic digital approach can provide councils with the management information they need to really understand their customers’ needs, letting them put in place meaningful service demand management strategies.
Communicate
A well informed customer is a happy customer, but just as importantly – they should not need to contact the council to find out what’s going on. By providing customers with proactive updates about their service requests and the ability to track progress online, councils can ensure every interaction is efficiently managed with the minimum effort but maximum impact.
If local authorities ensure they’re using technology to drive their digital agenda, by capturing what the customer wants, delivering what they need and keeping them informed every step of the way, they will have the ability to transform local services, not only for communities but for the employees who deliver them.
Chris Ginnelly, managing director of digital solutions, Civica
Demand response
Gain an insight into the demand-side
In association with Capita: It is more important than ever that councils actively and aggressively manage demand, believes Andy Theedom
Capita logo copy
Lean, shared services, channel shift – terms that have dominated the local government landscape in recent years as councils search for efficiencies against a backdrop of budget cuts. While 2015 has been another year of success for local councils in improving the way services are supplied, I believe councils must look ever more closely at the demand-side.
With rising demand, changing demographics and increasingly reduced budgets, it is essential to actively and aggressively manage demand – changing the way we work and moving to a new mode of community leadership that is more connected, collaborative and more reflective of the public councils serve.
Understanding demand
We can only manage demand if we understand it. This understanding is achieved through the use of insight and analytics, demand segmentation and information management.
We work with our clients to harness their data, using analytics tools to transorm this information into valuable insight
The proliferation and abundance of data can provide us with the raw material needed for customer-centric service design and organisational optimisation. At Capita, we work with our clients to harness their data, using analytics tools to transform this information into valuable insight. Our analytics community comprises more than 200 professionals that have an unrivalled combination of skills, and sector knowledge across both private and public sectors.
We are able to analyse and gain insight from the large volumes of closed and open, structured and unstructured data to understand what and why things have happened in the past. For example, we can understand what drives failure demand and cost in to the system. This provides actionable insight into what we should do in the future.
Our approach to analytics and insight works on four levels providing evidence for strategic service commissioning, transformation, service design and operations management.
An example of our analytics in action can be seen in our work with local authorities, helping them to tailor communication and recruitment strategies with the aim of increasing the number of fostering households.
Our insight is helping councils to focus marketing materials at particular segments of the population or at people living in specific places. We start by profiling current foster carers and then identify similar residents who could potentially become carers themselves. In addition, we analyse key features of those potential carers to understand how they could be targeted and encouraged to offer their support. This type of insight is helping to increase the number of applicants by 250%.
Tackle demand failure
Understanding demand as outlined above is not driven by customers but by the processes created by the council/partners. Process improvement and/or service redesign can prevent this.
This can be achieved in one of two ways. Firstly, by staff leading a continuous improvement into an organisation’s culture so that there is a constant and iterative, albeit small, increase in performance. Secondly, a design-led ‘step change’ approach in which processes are redesigned with some engagement but a greater focus on a data driven method. Both approaches can help address customer satisfaction and reduce cost.
Capita uses a structured approach to realising service improvement using a wide range of operational improvement tools and techniques combined with rigorous change management.
In summary, we believe in ‘situational’ service improvement and we will use whichever technique or others we are developing in our day-to-day work which are appropriate for the particular client situation, specifically designed around the people involved.
To illustrate our approach, The States of Jersey (SOJ) engaged Capita ‘to become an effective, efficient organisation, responsive to the needs of its customers and flexible to change by engaging and empowering its staff to improve services’.
Through our delivery of extensive, practical, experience-led training to more than 1000 staff and, the partnership has been able to identify over 250 improvement initiatives to create a portfolio of future projects. This is in addition to the fast realisation of many thousands of hours of value identified for quick reinvestment into SOJ and public services.
Services have tangibly and meaningfully improved for the public as a result of the Lean Academy. Furthermore, there is a clear commitment to lean methods and behaviours being a key part of the organisational culture in the future
Demand
Shift channels and redesign pathways
The way customers live and how organisations are run is changing as technology becomes increasingly integrated into our lives, connecting physical and digital worlds.
According to the Office for National Statistics, more than 88% of the UK population (aged 16 and over) are now online and smart phone use has more than doubled between 2010 and 2014, from 24% to 58%. Our customers can now work, shop, communicate, socialise and learn online, 24/7.
Being connected means our customers are empowered and they expect more – demanding tailored services at their pace and convenience. And if they don’t get what they want, when they want it, they share their experiences with others. Increasingly that sharing takes place over social media, providing immediate feedback that can potentially go viral, damaging the brand and revenue.
By combining information from different sources and linking in to one household, the council is able to provide services today that could save money and improve quality of life in the future
Faced with more downward pressure on budgets and the creative disruption of digital, organisations must transform the way they think about and deliver services. Shifting channels should mean not only lower costs, but also making it easier to sign post people to alternative sources of information or service. Handling ‘real’ demand in this way enables an organisation to retrain the customer to make smaller demands on service resources.
Our work with local authorities to co-design and co-deliver digital transformation is resulting in a multi-channel digital customer experience, broader and deeper self-service and increasing productivity through service-line automation, including mobile field teams.
Reduce demand – directly or indirectly
Demand can be reduced through prevention and/or readiness strategies and through more effective deployment of capacity beyond the council. This can be seen through our work with a council in the south-east, where Capita is using insight from data analytics to help the local authority meet the challenges of increasing demand and high customer expectations, combined with budgetary pressures.
Increasingly clients’ partnership relationship with Capita includes a dedicated insight team with data analysts, marketers, demographers and geographers. They capture data from a huge variety of sources to help pinpoint the exact needs and expectations of our residents as precisely as they possibly can, using our deep understanding of behavioural science.
The team has access to all manner of data sets, whether that is from council tax collections and housing benefits, parking permits, the school census or the electoral roll. As a result, the council is able to transform what it does based upon a new understanding of its residents’ preferences and needs.
The insight model we have developed is built on a data warehouse to help model and analyse information to help us understand the future demand for services from local citizens. This will identify those who need the support of the council, with the ultimate aim of creating a ‘single view’ of the customer to enable efficient and effective programmes of support to be developed.
For example, an interactive dashboard for council members provides a regular, up-to-date snapshot of information in the borough’s wards. This allows them to track changes over time and gives them a detailed view of residents, helping members make informed commissioning decisions.
And the council is already using insight to build an understanding of demographic changes in the borough, which will again help us plan for the future of our services.
By combining information from different sources and linking in to one household, the council is able to provide services today that could save money and improve quality of life in the future. This, ultimately, is the goal of the council’s insight service.
Conclusion
Accurately predicting future service demand and then working within the ‘behavioural economics’ space to prevent, deflect and divert is already critical for most councils. To meet the challenges ahead, the sector will need to become even more sophisticated – fortunately we are working with some clients whose progress gives us confidence that the sector more generally can rise to the challenge.
Andy Theedom is local government market director for Capita Transformation
Data management
Making evidence-based decisions
In association with Rocket: An innovative London borough is using Rocket BI to mine its data assets and improve the safety and wellbeing of residents, writes Gary Wilson
Rocket logo copy
Recent studies estimate that 90% of the world’s data has been created in the past two years. With such rapidly increasing volumes many organisations find themselves ‘drowning’ in data, yet ‘thirsting’ for insight. Differences in platform, database type, and version make it difficult to cross-reference operational data stores, while a variety of packaged reporting tools mean that skills to interrogate systems are often developed in silos.
Gary wilson
Gary Wilson
The insight and analytics team at Hammersmith & Fulham LBC has met this challenge by using the data virtualisation and business intelligence capabilities of Rocket software to access disparate data sources as if they were in a single location. This has enabled them to ask questions across multiple systems to identify fraud, provide better outcomes for children and to improve the safety of vulnerable children and adults.
By making better use of their internal information asset as a whole, the council has been successful in reallocating more than 60 properties to those most in need
An early project was to link the social care and housing systems to identify any vulnerable children in temporary accommodation. The success of this initiative prompted another project aimed at tackling tenancy fraud.
Social housing tenancy fraud is one of the most significant areas of fraud facing local government today. The issue is most acute in the London area, where rental market prices may be three or four times that of social housing. Some tenants choose to sublet and make a profit from the rental income. To identify such individuals the council used Rocket BI to link 12 databases containing details of local residents. Powerful data matching functionality was then used to cross reference the address details and find those with multiple locations.
The same forensic approach has been applied to additional projects resulting in millions of pounds in savings. For example, within the last two years the council has saved £1,070,000 on a Freedom Pass project alone.
Free trial
A 30-day free trial of Rocket Discover can be downloaded from the Rocket website at http://www.rocketsoftware.com/download-discover. There are free video tutorials available and the trial covers up to 50 users.
CASE STUDY: HAMMERSMITH & FULHAM LBC
Many of our reports and queries involved the extraction of large datasets, which were then imported into MS Excel and MS Access, manipulated and presented. This was especially the case for reporting from our social care system where large workflows are involved with a string of subsequent events. We have now transferred all these reports to Rocket BI and it takes less than a minute to create reports that used to take over an hour each day.
Another benefit is reduced data storage costs as we no longer need to extract data. Queries run ‘live’ and also very quickly so we can now easily access the raw data within our core systems. For some time we had suspected that there may have been errors within the ‘universes’ supplied with our social care system. However it was difficult to tell as the tables were hidden and merged as datamarts.
Using Rocket BI means that we no longer require ‘universes’ and have greater visibility of the data, allowing us to accurately track cases and packages through the entire system. One of the major advantages of this system is that it can successfully link to any database on any platform. Traditionally, reporting and querying tools have been bundled with the databases of operational systems. As a result, we have spent too much money on licencing costs for reporting software, and developed our skills in isolated silos.
We also struggled to join a large string of events together –sometimes as many as 10 to 12 –to monitor someone’s journey through social care. This has become not only possible but very easy using Rocket BI. Cross-referencing different datasets at the same time means that we can develop a cross-departmental view of clients and develop a far more intelligent picture of what is going on.
Given that much of government policy is focusing on families and problems in their entirety this ability is proving invaluable in linking datasets together that otherwise could not be linked.
Head of Insight & Analytics, Hammersmith & Fulham LBC
Data management2
If you would like a more managed evaluation then contact us directly using the details below:
Gary Wilson, Sales Manager, Business Intelligence And Analytics, Rocket Software UK Ltd
+44 (0)845 070 38 38
gwilson@rocketsoftware.com
www.rocketsoftware.com
Active leisure
Breaking down the barriers
Provider Places for People Leisure is facing up to a challenging time for the leisure sector, says operations director John Oxley
Places for people
Active leisure, as a sector, is at a crossroads. Activity levels have been stubbornly constant over the past 10 years, in terms of the number of active people, according to Sport England. Although 15.8 million adults now play sport in England and Wales, which is 1.4 million more than in 2005-06, 58.6% still play no sport at all.
John oxley
John Oxley
At the same time local authorities fear that by 2020 the £1.4bn that they spend per year on active leisure will have to reduce to £900m per year due to funding pressure.
This means that we, as a leisure provider, need to find ways to be more efficient, to attract more customers, and to have our existing customers visit us more often. Places for People Leisure is facing up to this challenge in three ways.
The first approach we’re using is to continue to work with existing and future local authority partners to rationalise facilities, transforming old leisure facilities, like our sites in Wycombe, Wyre Forest and Eastleigh, into better facilities that will be more attractive to local residents, and crucially drive participation upwards in order to ensure developments are largely self-funding.
Secondly, we are continuing to upskill our staff. Their role is very different to what it was five or six years ago. They have to be much more proactive in ensuring the customer experience is a positive one eg assisting behavioural change for customers in our gyms. In the past, staff were simply trained to deliver a supervisory service in a gym, for example. Now we’re training them to undertake motivational interviewing, measure the health benefits of a person’s visit. Quite often that visit may be part of an intervention of a partner in a public health collaboration, such as a local authority, clinical commissioning group.
The final approach is our increasing focus on customer engagement and experience. We are about to appoint a customer experience manager to transform our whole approach to all interactions between us and our customers.
We are developing self-serve systems, contactless payment, and online bookings; indeed, anything that can make it easier for customers to visit us and stay with us. Our work with Oncourse, a system for customers to access online their child’s progress in a swimming lesson, are further examples of meeting customer expectations.
Equally important within this initiative is to achieve better customer insight by capturing their data more effectively. This in turn leads to better customer engagement.
We are developing self-serve systems, contactless payment, and other online bookings; indeed anything that can make it easier for customers to visit and stay with us
We are already working hard to improve our data collection, through our use, for example, of Swimtag technology. These wearable devices track our customers’ performance in our pools. Using that data, we can give our customers feedback on their fitness progress, track the busiest times in the pools, work out which residents need encouraging to take more exercise, and share that data with partners such as local authorities.
We are also working with Sport England at our Wycombe centre on a facial recognition system. This technology would use cameras around the leisure centre to recognise the faces of customers as they move around the facility. The software does not record who they are, ensuring customer confidentiality, but allows us to track the time that image/person spends with us, what time of day they come and how frequently, which activities they undertake and their approximate age and gender. This will provide real insight into understanding our customers better.
A great example of what insight into a customer base can achieve is Sport England’s ‘This Girl Can’ campaign.
The campaign targets women, who can be underrepresented in active leisure. Through a vibrant series of video advertisements, shown on national television and online, and using stories of real female athletes in a variety of sports, the campaign tackles the barriers that prevent many women and girls taking part in sport: the damaging ideas that women are physically unsuited to it, or that they will look unattractive while doing it.
Tapping into aninspiring theme of female empowerment, the campaign is a “celebration of active women up and down the country who are doing their thing no matter how well they do it, how they look or even how red their face gets”, as Sport England says on its website.
We want to build on the findings of that campaign and the key to success is to understand the barriers and come up with actions to overcome them.
We are, for example, working on a pilot with Sport England to provide better promotional imagery to appeal to the different people within particular community, targeting, for instance, female residents or those from particular ethnic minorities.
We are looking to boost participation in active leisure to help local authorities, through physical activity, achieve their public health aims and improve the health and happiness of communities.
The only way to do that is with empathy, insight and an improved leisure offer.
Supplier relationships
A smarter approach
In association with Northgate: Rachel Dalton talks to Powys CC’s David Powell about the authority’s changing relationship with third party suppliers
Supplier relationships
Northgate logo copy
“The major risk to local authorities is the financial challenge,” says David Powell, Powys CC’s strategic director of resources.
“However, you’ve also got to realise that you’ve still got a considerable amount of resource to fund services. It’s about how we make the most effective use of the resources that we have.”
It is this attitude that is driving Powys CC’s new approach to its relationships with suppliers. The council is targeting a reduction in its spending on third parties of £8.5m over the next three years.
“The council, as part of its medium-term financial planning, identified the need to make cost reductions and wherever possible protect frontline services,” Mr Powell explains.
“One of the ways that it decided to approach the challenge was to look at how it could save money through being more effective and efficient about its dealings with third parties and the expenditure that was being made.
“We’re targeting a reduction of third party spending by £8.5m, making a contribution to the council’s total targeted savings of £37m.”
Tackling third party spending is a significant feat for any organisation and that extends to Powys CC.
Mr Powell says the council was spending 40% of its budget on third parties, and that a Welsh government review of the authority in 2014 had said that Powys CC’s procurement function was “less mature” than that of other Welsh local authorities, which was “an important catalyst for change”.
“We’ve got a net revenue budget of £238m, and this is the most sparsely populated local authority area in England and Wales,” Mr Powell explains.
“That makes influencing the third party spending even more challenging because we have fewer providers than urban authorities. It brings with it an additional challenge. We’ve calculated that we’ve got contracts of £200m over the next 18 months.”
Northgate Public Services (NPS) has been Powys CC’s efficiency partner since 2014. It has been involved with the council’s work on improving procurement and the first step was a six-week review of procurement activity, which highlighted a number of opportunities.
These included better controls and approval mechanisms to drive down the level of ad hoc spending, the creation of a robust contracts register, clearly setting out all of Powys CC’s suppliers, and renegotiation of key supplier contracts.
The next step in the process has been to set up a dedicated team to continue the work on third party suppliers in-house following the end of NPS’ contract with Powys CC, Mr Powell says.
“We’ve set up a commercial services team, which NPS is mentoring as our strategic partner, to accelerate delivery and transfer of knowledge,” he says.
This team is “more than a procurement team”, Mr Powell adds.
“They are individuals who are helping the authority become more commercial in its dealings with third parties,” he says.
“Typically, local authorities have procurement functions, where you go to the manager and say ‘I need a contract’. But we need to say, ‘how can we challenge the existing contractors to deliver better value for money?’
“So, our commercial services team is coming up with a long-term strategic plan for managing contracts. It’s about helping departments to understand how they can get the best value out of the market.”
The team is working on developing the supplier market as well, Mr Powell says.
“The sort of things we will see the team doing will be soft market testing, where we stimulate interest in the market before we go out to tender,” he says.
“So, we typically advertise and interested parties come in to discuss with us the opportunity, to see what interest there is in the market; that’s the sort of thing that the commercial team will help with.”
Keeping the commercial function within one team is a new way of working at Powys CC.
“We’ve worked towards a single view of the commercial workload, so we can deploy the right resource from one shared team,” Mr Powell explains.
“At the moment we’ve got NPS embedded in the team, and they are helping us analyse the workload and bring clarity to how long commissioning activity will take and also what the expected outcomes in financial service will be.”
Rigorous accountability and scrutiny is also an important part of the project, Mr Powell says.
“We have set up a commercial and commissioning board. It has elected members on it and that oversees the work; that’s given us an appropriate level of challenge from the elected members.”
Overall, Powys CC’s approach, Mr Powell says, will help the council make better use of the public money it is entrusted with, and help to secure better services for its residents for years to come.
