Swale Borough Council

At key times of the year we see long call waiting times and high abandonment rates.  Most of the time people are waiting in a queue when they could find out the information or use an online form to do it for themselves.  A simple message saying ‘please go to xx.gov.uk’ is often not enough encouragement for people to move to channels.  This reluctance has historically been made worse by poorly designed websites which are hard to navigate and not user friendly.

Given all three councils are in the process of launching new websites, we would like to find a different way of moving people online and using these services where appropriate.   Using IVR and the users own responses to a series of options we should be able to reliably predict what they need to do and, if appropriate, where on our site we could signpost them to.   We can then connect them to the exact form or information that they need.  We know that similar work is being done, but we would like to expand this from not only sending a link (this modality switch can cause friction) but also giving them direct access to the information on the web page.

This would give us the opportunity to:

• Reduce avoidable customer contact
• Improve our service to those who are vulnerable by freeing up officer time to deal with complex cases
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Channel shift a significant proportion of contact