4. Key ‘strategic imperatives’ for transformation: 2. Improve our online services
2. Improve our online services through our Open for Business project.
Our customers want to do business with us in ways and at times that suit them best. In the 21st century people expect to be able to transact on-line if they want to.
Our Open for Business web project has two main objectives which is to make sure people can find what they are looking for on our web pages and do business with the council online across a range of services, if they want to.
Rather than design everything from scratch, we have decided to model our website on the principles used for the gov.uk award winning website. Just like them we have designed our website to be:
Centred around our customers’ needs
- Clear
- Simple
- Fast
- Organised
- Rational
This project focused on both content and digital services. We have trained web authors across the council to be able to write content for the web. Web authors are responsible for writing and updating content and keeping this live and current.
Our web authors have turned thousands of out of date PDF documents and web pages into up to date, accessible web pages organised in hubs.
We are consulting with our customers and our equalities partners to ensure that they like what we developed.
Our Open for Business web channel project has seen us more than double our on line transactional activity since 2012.
Key actions
Explore technology which will provide a digital platform which means customers sign on once and transactions are integrated with back office systems.
Customer portals such as this capture customer data across all channels.
Owner: SMT and Strata
Timescale: End 2017
Potential savings/value creation: This will create a single customer view so that we can see what contact the customer has previously had with their council across all service areas.
Savings will be made as customers switch to online services. A customer portal can potentially help the council identify these savings across all channels but a business case will need to be developed.
Revenues & Benefits self service
Owner: Libby Jarrett Service Lead
Timescale: 2017/18
Potential savings/value creation: £30k (1FTE). One post was reduced in 2016/17, this is an additional post.