3.2 Previous reports to elected members have highlighted that it was becoming increasingly clear that the Council's capacity to develop Customer Services was limited by technology platforms. Over the last 10-12 weeks this has become more critical as the availability of the operational system supporting the Contact Centre has deteriorated.

3.3 A short-life project team was established and led by E-Government. This included staff from BT, Finance, Financial Services, Customer Services and PSP functions. Heads of Service were identified as sponsors and champions of the interests in their respective departments. A list of staff participating in the exercise is attached as Appendix 1.

3.4 A draft Customer Services Vision and a methodology for the work were discussed with Heads of Service from all departments at the Smart City Steering Group on 13 August.

3.5 Departmental workshops, introduced by the appropriate Head of Service, were held over the following three week period to identify current baseline information, “pain points” and critical success factors. Follow up meetings have been held with Heads of Service to review findings and the proposals set out within this report.

4 Customer Services Vision

4.1 The project team have identified the following proposed vision or mission statement for the programme:

“Working together to put the Customer first…….making our services:

for all our Customers”

4.2 This vision has been discussed and refined with staff from across the Council through departmental workshops. In practical terms staff have identified that achieving this vision will require:

4.3 The workshops have identified that an effective transformation programme will require as much, if not more, focus on process, organisation and people/cultural issues as new technologies. Appendix 2 provides an outline diagram to explain the proposed transformation programme.

5 Workshop Findings

5.1 The overarching observation from departmental workshops is that it is not possible to gain a comprehensive robust baseline of current performance or cost of Customer Services across the organisation. The current approach to performance management does not clearly identify costs or performance levels of customer services to allow the planning of improvements.

5.2 The workshops identified a fragmented understanding of service processes and consistency in customer experience both within departments and across the Council. This makes the adoption of a single customer record and customer relationship management system particularly risky. It has not been possible to identify specific detailed functional requirements for the introduction of this technology.

5.3 On this basis it is recommended that Year 1 of an investment programme should focus on Understanding our Operations and Customer which will allow a clear baseline and plan for improvement to be established from which to monitor performance improvement. A series of tactical improvement projects both in terms of organisation, business process and technology should be taken forward addressing particular `pain points' in parallel to this work.

5.4 The workshops identified for all departments a series of `quick wins' which, with limited investment, could drive significant improvement to Customer Service. These ideas have been shared with the appropriate Heads of Service. However key challenges highlighted by staff (direct workshop quotes) include:

5.5 Appendix 3 provides a more detailed summary of the outputs from the workshops held with departments.

6 Proposed Customer Services Programme

6.1 The workshops have identified that a Customer Services programme should be taken forward over a five year period through to 2012. The initial phase of work should focus on addressing “pain points” with existing service, understanding our current operation and planning for customer focused standardised services across the Council. Later phases would implement this standard model across the Council and seek to pro-actively provide an integrated and joined-up customer experience between services. This is outlined in the diagram below:

6.2 The programme has been designed from the basis that the Council will want to operate effectively delivering integrated and joined up Customer Service by 2012. The Council needs to commit in principle to the objectives of a five-year programme to achieve this vision. The overall business case will be continuously revised and refined as the Council gains a better understanding of our operations and customer. It is proposed that the programme will be to delivered as a series of short, time-bound improvements which build towards the vision rather than the traditional single large scale monolithic change project. The proposed phasing will also address improvement in high-volume transactional services at as early a stage of the programme as possible.

6.3 The ambition will be to create momentum and gain staff commitment to the wider, more strategic changes later in the programme. It should however be recognised that commitment to the Vision and Scale of the Programme at this stage is essential if not for every particular project and investment.

6.4 A work programme has been identified by the project team which comprises of ten separate but interdependent workstreams or projects. These are:

These individual workstreams or projects need to be brought together in terms of both programme management but also in order to establish effective performance management and planning of customer service improvement at a corporate and departmental level.

6.5 Appendix 4 of this report presents the outline scope of each of the workstreams or projects and the anticipated deliverables at the ends of Years 1, 3 and 5 of the proposed programme. A substantial part of the proposed programme in Year 1 will be focused on understanding our current operation and baseline, allowing improvements to be planned and targets set for benefit realisation. A robust business case can then be created and iteratively refined as the programme is taken forward.

6.6 As anticipated the workstreams and projects with the highest costs are those which involve significant technology investment. The project team recommend that the most significant of these investments (Enterprise-Wide CRM) is delayed by 12 months until work is undertaken to understand our current operation and plans for adoption of customer focused standardised services across the Council are completed. There is a significant risk that adopting such technology at too early a stage of the programme would lead to rework or the failure to deliver real business benefit due to a lack of understanding of potential benefits leading to non-adoption of new ways of working. It should however be noted that implementation of an Enterprise-Wide CRM system is seen as essential to delivery of the vision of integrated customer service and a common assessment process.

6.7 This recommendation is dependent on establishing urgent short-term plans to replace the unstable system supporting the contact centre operation. It is hoped that a tactical solution along side improvements to telephony systems can be agreed shortly. This interim solution should also provide the ability to test further the potential of an integrated customer record between the contact centre and back office in a limited number of service areas.

6.8 Workstreams and projects are at different stages of development with a detailed specification, plans and outline costings already in place for upgrade on the Web/Intranet project. It is recommended that the outline scope of the Customer Services programme is agreed and that detailed Project Initiation Documents (PIDs) and three year budgets are now prepared for each of the workstreams.

6.9 It is recommended that a Programme Board is created for the Customer Services Workstream of Achieving Excellence which will be chaired by the Director of Corporate Services. Heads of Service would lead particular cross-cutting projects within the overall programme but also take responsibility for championing the development of Customer Services within their department.

7 Financial Implications

7.1 Outline costs for the five year work programme are presented as Appendix 5 of this report. It should be noted that these cost estimates are likely to require significant amendment as each of the projects and workstreams is scoped. At this early stage of scoping the total costs of the programme over five years are £16.984m.

7.2 Costs of £3.2m have been identified for the first year of implementation of which:

7.3 Costs in Years 2 and Years 3 of the programme rise significantly to £5.5m. This rise in the cost of the programme is largely due to the costs associated with introduction of an enterprise wide CRM platform.

7.4 A range of potential funding sources have been identified for the programme:

8.5 Key issues to note are:

9 Environmental Impact

9.1 It is anticipated that the proposed Customer Services programme has the potential to realise significant environmental improvements particularly through the reduction of printed output and through the movement of customer contact to more efficient and effective channels. Work to date has identified that accurate baseline information is not readily available from departments. A critical activity over the next year will be to establish a baseline from which to measure improvement.