Agenda item

Customer and Digital Programme - Progress Report

Minutes:

The Assistant Director, Customer, Information and Digital Services and the Head of Customer Services attended the meeting to provide a progress report on the council’s Customer and Digital Programme.

 

The report stated that the council’s Customer and Digital programme aimed to ensure that high quality services  were provided in a modern, efficient and joined up way so that all customers, regardless of their circumstances, had access to the services they needed as well as always receiving a consistently positive experience.

 

The Assistant Director, Customer, Information and Digital Services made a presentation to the meeting that provided information on:

 

·       The redesign of the Rotherham MBC website and its positive impact on the user experience and the increased number of services that could be accessed online.

 

·       How the website had been used to support the council’s response to the pandemic.

 

·       Activities surrounding how the programme was reviewing and redesigning the way in which the council was delivering services in order to improve the customer experience.

 

·       Processes that had been implemented to enable and encourage customers to use self-serve processes, reduce avoidable contact and to remove unnecessary or duplicated actions in back office processes.

 

·       How the Customer and Digital Programme was supporting the delivery of the council’s Year Ahead Plan.

 

·       The £662,000 of financial savings that the programme had helped to deliver.

 

Members noted the importance of services being accessible via other channels and not just online, as not all residents could access services online. The Assistant Director assured members that access to services would never just be online only and that residents would be able to continue to access services in other ways. Members noted that many residents frequently advised that they found the Planning function on the council’s website difficult to use. The Assistant Director advised that while the planning portal used to manage planning applications was an external site, discussions were taking place with the Planning Service on how to make the site more accessible.

 

Members asked for clarification around the number of visitors to the website in the period April – September 2020 that the officer’s report stated to be one million, as to whether they were visits from unique users. The Assistant Director advised that the figures quoted for website visits were those from unique users. Members noted the upcoming focus of the programme to transform services and deliver savings in the Regeneration and Environment Directorate and asked for further information on the planned activity in this area. The Assistant Director advised work was taking place with teams in that directorate to identify systems and processes that needed to be improved, and that many areas for development had already been identified. The Assistant Director noted the challenges of carrying out the work required to enable the changes and to deliver the subsequent savings while the council was also managing its response to the pandemic.

 

Members welcomed that the vision of the Customer and Digital Programme was clearly showing results and that new processes were delivering savings and improving residents access to council services. Members noted the high levels of satisfaction of residents with council services that were being reported and asked for further information on how customer satisfaction was measured and recorded. The Assistant Director advised that not all services that were accessed by residents were managed by Customer Services, and that the methods for recording satisfaction over these services was not done uniformly, so that assessing customer satisfaction accurately was not straightforward.

 

Members stated their satisfaction with the new council website, noting its user-friendly layout and modern look. Members also noted their satisfaction with the new member casework system that was being trialled by some elected members.

 

The Chair thanked the Assistant Director, Customer, Information and Digital Services and the Head of Customer Services for attending the meeting and answering members’ questions.

 

Resolved: -

 

1)    That the report be noted.

 

2)    That the Minutes of the discussion on the report be fed into the considerations of the sub-group of the Overview and Scrutiny Management Board on Communications, with the recommendations of the group being subsequently reported at a future meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny Management Board.

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