Improve interactions with your customers

How you can deliver savings and improve the customer experience with a targeted approach to customer access design, supporting technology and channel shift

Against the backdrop of unprecedented cuts to local government budgets improving the end to end customer experience and moving customers to more cost effective channels provides an opportunity to make significant savings, whilst also improving the experience of the customer. In our experience:

• A significant number of your residents are happy to use web, mobile and other low-cost technologies for most of the things they do on a daily basis;
• By enabling these residents to access council services via these channels more easily, you can drastically reduce the cost of customer services whilst offering residents a more convenient time and method to contact you;
• By ensuring that the end to end customer journey is as efficient and intuitive as possible and is supported by the appropriate technology, you can reduce avoidable contact and failure demand which will further reduce cost;
• This will allow you to focus your officers’ valuable face-to-face time on customers with sensitive needs and complex cases, where it is most needed.

We support councils to reduce costs and improve customer services by enabling residents to self-serve wherever possible.

We care about customer access, and we understand it.

We are currently working with the London Borough of Camden, providing ongoing support, training and challenge to the council’s internal team as they develop the next stage of their customer access programme, and the London Borough of Merton, conducting a rationalisation review of 250 IT systems and have recently completed projects for a number of clients including:

• London Borough of Merton where we reviewed their technology provision underpinning their customer access delivery and carried out gap analysis for their preferred future contact models
• London Borough of Camden where we have just developed their customer access strategy and cost and benefit action plan
• London Borough of Sutton where we developed their customer access strategy and a cost and benefit action plan to implement the strategy, which we then helped them to deliver
• Brighton and Hove City Council where we conducted a review of customer access and technology where we conducted a review of customer access and technology provision across the council, highlighting areas for potential rationalisation, next steps for customer access and areas of ‘low hanging fruit’ for immediate change and savings.

Janette Garlick, Head of Customer Services, London Borough of Sutton

We recognise the importance of consistent and comparable data, understand the rigorous analysis and the engagement required to develop the ideal customer access model, which should both deliver savings and meet customer requirements.

We always drive our review from the customers’ perspective, channel shift does not simply mean moving all customers to the web, but should instead result in a more tailored offering, that matches your specific residents’ requirements.   We know that one size does not fit all councils, or all customers.

We believe that BDO is the right external partner to support Councils to improve their interactions with their customers because:

• We are customer access and channel shift experts
• We have a practical, targeted and realistic approach that will both deliver you cashable savings whilst improving customers’ experience
• We are not afraid to challenge but do so appropriately
• We have a strong track record of successful delivery
• We understand and are passionate about local government
• Clients like working with us

If you would like to hear more about what we could do for your organisation, learn more about customer access then please contact Kate Denham on 020 7893 2053 or her mobile 07709827028. Kate can be emailed at kate.denham@bdo.co.uk