Councils can make major savings by changing the way they manage customer contact, according to a new report from Socitm.

The body for council ICT professionals urges local authorities to fully capitalise on websites in customer management by making ‘digital the default’.

All front office customer contact, whether face to face, by phone, through the website or other means, should also be brought under central management, to enable customer contact to be run to common standards.

Better served: customer access, efficiency and channel shift says that traditionally, planning, social services and other local authority departments have managed their own customers. Despite recent moves to reap efficiencies by splitting front and back office management, tradition persists, and in many councils there is no corporate role or responsibility for customers.

However, the report adds that comprehensive data is key to delivering these efficiencies and councils cannot start on an effective programme of ‘channel shift’ until data is collected and is available for analysis.

Cost reduction from active customer management can come from three main sources:

• Greater efficiency in handling contacts, where a greater proportion of contacts are resolved quickly, and at the initial contact by introducing professional customer service approaches and common standards
• Reduction in ‘avoidable contacts’ (ie situations where the customer has to contact the council unnecessarily in connection with an enquiry, perhaps because no information was available, or it was of poor quality, or a service was not delivered as expected)
• Shifting of enquiries from relatively high cost-to-serve channels (phone, mail and face-to-face) to a lower cost-to-serve channel (usually, but not always, the web).

The report cites four case studies from councils that have adopted comprehensive approaches to customer management:

• Birmingham City Council anticipates £197.4m of cashable benefits over 10 years from its ‘Customer First’ programme, which is part of a wider programme of council-wide transformation
• Tameside MBC aims to save £1m over the next four years from better management of the front office
• Surrey CC has reduced cost of phone and web contacts from 79p to 49p per enquiry since 2007 and saved £175,000 in its contact centre plus £150,000 elsewhere by reducing avoidable contact
• Rhondda Cynon Taf CBC which started by improving its website before making moves to create channel shift

‘This report gives real insight in how frontline delivery can be reshaped to protect service quality and reduce cost’ says Jos Creese, President of Socitm.

‘What is recommended is not without risk, but the pace and depth of public sector cuts and reform requires a radical rethink about how we design and deliver services.’

Better served: customer access, efficiency and channel shift can be downloaded from www.socitm.net free of charge by Socitm Insight subscribers. It costs £295 for others (£275 Socitm members).