Thursday 2 September 2010

Poor performance affecting take up of low cost online services

Web performance must improve to achieve cost-saving channel shift says Socitm's latest half-yearly review from the Customer Access Improvement Service

Poorly performing council websites are hampering the mass channel shift urgently needed to reduce the public sector's costs of service delivery.

Socitm's latest data continues to evidence how much cheaper the web channel can be than going through an intermediary, such as the phone call or the visit to the one-stop shop. "However," says Martin Greenwood, programme manager for Socitm Insight, "Channel shift online will only work if websites work right first time and every time."

Socitm's latest Customer Access Improvement Service briefing provides results from three different services that monitor take up and performance of the most important customer access channels used by customers to access council services: Socitm's Website Takeup and Channel Value Benchmarking services, and the GovMetric service.

Data from the Channel Value Benchmarking service puts the comparative cost to councils per enquiry at £7.40 for face-to-face, £2.90 for the telephone and just £0.32 for web enquiries.

However, GovMetric data shows that, despite being the busiest channel, the web gives by far the least satisfactory performance - with 42% of visitors rating it as poor, compared with 15% of face-to-face visitors and just 1% of callers by phone. The main cause of dissatisfaction is failure to find what people are looking for - a very basic function for public sector websites.

Greenwood argues that this is likely to directly lead to repeat contacts as visitors go to other, more expensive channels (predominantly the phone, according to information from the Website Takeup service) for answers to their enquiries.

In May, around one fifth of visitors (20.74%) failed to find what they were looking for on the web, with a further fifth (21.28%) only finding part of that. Socitm estimates that this could be costing councils up to an additional £17m to service these enquiries, which could have been 'self-serviced' on the web.

Adds Greenwood, "Information from Socitm's Better connected survey suggests under-investment in the web is the cause of its current low performance and this needs to change. Investment in the web that will reap significant returns because of the potential to reduce the cost of meeting customer enquiries.