Everything should be made as simple as possible...

The council provides care services to an increasingly ageing population which are means tested often requiring top up sundry payments to be made.  Currently the customer experience is confusing, resulting in many users trying to find out by phone how to pay their invoices. In some cases users call many times a day without success. This poor process has resulted in significant aged debt and poor cashflow against this cost recovery which equates to around £30m+/ year.  Furthermore, additional strain is placed on the call centres in handling these calls.

As part of a drive to reduce debt and drive operational efficiencies Roy Beaven (Senior Business Analyst working in IDS) identified an opportunity to reduce this problem.  The current sundry invoice process includes a facility for users to pay online, however the Civica Pay URL was far too long and difficult to remember, the signposting to this was not ideal and therefore not included in the Intelligent Voice Routing (IVR) system at all.   

Roy had proposed to better sign post the digital customer journey by adding a short, easy to remember URL in a prominent place on the customer’s invoice and on a new Intelligent Voice Routing telephony system (IVR). To achieve this Roy contacted the web team and the solution proposed was to implement a 301 redirect rule from a short URL, namely https://leeds.gov.uk/bill.

As Einstein would say "Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler" meaning in this case the customer journey should be made as easy as possible to understand but not so simplified that it becomes meaningless. In this case this is a great example of how simple solutions can be very powerful in their impact.

Once this new and improved customer journey has been implemented the impact/ improvement on debt, aged debt/ cashflow and customer satisfaction will be greatly improved, and internal call volumes to the Sundry Income team should be almost eliminated.

Roy Beaven: “What a great experience! Sometimes even simple ideas can be difficult to get over the line, but not in this case. Two phone calls and two days later the re-direct was in place and proliferating across the web. A big thank you to Phil Jefferies and the team” I will now monitor calls and payments ongoing to see if this can be improved further."

If you have similar ideas for how we can improve and simplify online customer journeys please get in touch.