Helping Merton Council improve their digital platform to help constituents manage services and grow confidence in their local authority
Helping Merton Council improve their digital platform to help constituents manage services and grow confidence in their local authority
Merton Council wanted to provide an effective citizen service that would enable channel shift from traditional and costly service delivery methods to digital-first contact methods and transactions. The redesign needed to increase citizen and employee engagement and self service transactions, minimise failed and aborted visits, reduce calls and print communications, improve operational efficiency and raise the Council’s brand perception.
Goals
Channel shift to digital to improve service delivery and move from an information provider to a business with sales targets
Increase registration conversions and up-sell additional services, reduce call centre reliance and costs
Meet current accessibility and government web standards
Becoming proactive not reactive
The original website was confusing and overly complicated, leaving most users reaching for the phone to call the council to try to complete tasks or resolve issues, costing the council money that could be used more effectively elsewhere.
We worked closely with 8 different groups at Merton Council to establish how they currently use the website to deliver information and applications for their services, creating maps of the current user journeys across the site and ideating new journeys to reduce time on site, amount of content and a better site structure.
We created architecture to show how the platform would operate across any device and to build templates for key pages and user work streams for 8 key areas that would be rolled out across all current and future user flows. These helped to ideate:
A simplified content structure and clear entry to services
A task based navigation
A one-stop shop for service purchase and management
A way for customers to self-serve
Solution
A new platform design that's more accessible, relevant and meaningful to grow adoption from Merton constituents of a channel-shift to using digital services to manage affairs and grow confidence in their local authority as a proactive rather than reactive touch-point.
Improved findability
With a new navigation system that met the UK governments standards, tasks or content is never more than 3 clicks away. A card sorting exercise allowed us to organise content more logically with better sign-posting.
Buying & monitoring services
More logical, shorter forms made signing up for services simple, with in single steps on each screen.
Clearer confirmation screens meant that customers were clear about what they had ordered, what the service would deliver, and what their next steps were.
The goal was to have all constituents have an account to help them to sign up for services and introduce them to services they may find useful. This up-selling would also provide a much needed increase in revenue.
Services could be bought, monitored and renewed easily from the account dashboard. Accessible across any device meant that tracking service delivery was easy, enabling customers to self-serve and drastically reduced calls to the council.
For customers who were elderly or with disabilities, linked accounts meant that services could be administered on their behalf by family members, or carers.
Discovering local services
Constituents can now easily find and sign up for local services and events.
“We’ve been so impressed by the work Chris and the team have done on the web design. The deliverables have consistently met or even exceeded our expectations.
What’s been really impressive is the way they have tapped into our psyche and picked up on our corporate identity and what’s important to us as an organisation. These are things we can’t articulate so it’s a real achievement for them to have both understood them and captured them in the designs they’ve developed.”
Guides
Developer guides were created to aid in the platform build.
What we learnt...
This project was about shifting a councils mindset from not only being a service provider but also a business that was as entitled to create revenue from it’s services. Providing a smooth path to buying, managing and delivery of services was the key to customers seeing the value in the products they were consuming. Disgruntled customers question the value of a service. Delighted customers are more likely to buy additional services.