Gateway redesign, data capture and behavioural change workshop delivery

Background

Smarter Digital Services (SDS) recently assisted Swale Borough Council with a review of their existing services at the Sheppey Gateway. In addition, Swale Borough Council also wanted SDS to carry out a series of Behaviour Change workshops for internal staff members.

Currently, the services provided by the Sheppey Gateway are very personable and predominantly all handled face-to-face. Swale Borough Council wanted to adopt a new approach to how they deliver their services to residents as well as preparing their staff for the changes ahead.

Understanding the present

SDS spent a period of time at the Sheppey Gateway to review the existing requirements and functionality central to delivering all services to residents.

We also spent time shadowing and talking to the staff in the Sheppey Gateway to gain an understanding of how the Council interact with their residents and what processes were currently in place.

Critically, the staff were asked to collect data for every interaction they had with a resident. This provided the foundation to benchmark performance, what services were being delivered and, crucially, how the services were being delivered (whether the resident was assisted in completing their request or transaction or not).

It was evident that the team were offering an outstanding service to the customer, but there was very little customer self-service or assisted self-service taking place.

SDS were able to evaluate the existing facilities and functionality and compare them to the staff and customer needs in order to recommend future facility and functionality requirements to promote a customer self-serve environment.

The data that was captured allowed SDS to carry out a cost-to-serve analysis which demonstrated the impact of the existing service delivery vs a digital customer self-serve service delivery, highlighting the potential benefits and incentives of making that fundamental change to service delivery.

Delivering a series of Behavioural Change workshops for internal stakeholders at Swale

There is a lot of change, particularly digital transformation, taking place currently at Swale Borough Council which is critical to moving to a more sustainable and customer-focused approach to service delivery.

However, with big change comes uncertainty and apprehension. Behaviour change is one the most pivotal aspects of driving a successful digital transformation project. And this is both in respect of our staff and our residents.

In order to create an environment of effective change, it will first be necessary to ensure that the authority makes a change before an expectation of the same can be placed on the Citizen.

Swale Borough Council invited SDS to facilitate a total of 6 behaviour change workshops across 3 days to assist in promoting internal engagement with digital transformation.

The workshops for many were an introduction to the concepts of behaviour change, what they are, and why Public sector organisations need to change existing behaviours to offer the services residents expect.

The workshops provided a detailed overview with Public sector working examples of some of the key behavioural change techniques such as:

• Nudge
• MINDSPACE
• EAST
• Four E’s

We also looked at how the expectations of our customers are shifting. Our customers now expect a quick, easy, experience that is accessible from anywhere and at any time. An experience similar to the one a customer enjoys with a company like Amazon.

Authorities recognise that they need to keep pace with the services provided by technological giants but the necessary changes first need to be embraced by those who provide the service.

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