Case study from Blaby District Council, winner of the rubbish & recycling category of the Better Connected Awards, presented 29 June at Connected Local Govenement Live
2. About Blaby
Located in the East Midlands
– south/west of Leicester
• Population: 96,500
• Households: 41,871
• Mosaic - 60% of households are likely to use online services.
3. Communications Team
• Website & My Account
• Intranet
• CRM
• Online forms/integration
• Process mapping
• Performance/Measures
• Support calls – CSA’s
• Procurement – API’s etc
4. Website –
www.blaby.gov.uk
Communications team
– CMS
– Training/Guides – Style Guide
– Structure/navigation/create pages
– Landing pages
– Assets (images/documents)
– 3rd party skins
– My Account
– Process mapping/testing forms
– Online forms + call to action
buttons!
– Setting up users/groups
– Moderation of content
– Distribute website feedback
– Talk to the services!!
– Review Better Connected results
and implement changes
• Services
– Put forward officers for
training
– Add content
– Review website feedback
and make amends
– Involved in process
mapping
– Testing online forms
5. Bulky – key features
• Page content
Who, What, Why, When, Where, How….
– Who is the service for? (residents of the district!)
– What is the service?
– How much does it cost?
– How do I request?
– What do you collect
– Where do I leave my items?
Then ask yourself – what’s missing?
What’s the overall purpose of the service? Other ways to dispose..
Keep it simple – no jargon!
6. Bulky – key features
• Navigation/Landing pages/A-Z
• Google Custom Search - Enable promotions (for top tasks)
7. Bulky digital form
• Historically – spreadsheet.
• One customer form – used in two places (CRM & Website)
• Website – form live since 2014
• CRM – live since November 2015.
FORMS
• Bulky item request (CRM & Website)
• Quote process used once quote has
been carried out – accept quote and
book in
• Amend booking (CRM)
• Bulky admin (back office)
8. Bulky item request
PDF report generated listing collections for day, emailed to depot @ 5am
Not a huge authority – about 250 employees
Very urban and rural area – no town in the district – made up of 24 parishes.
Our main offices are based in the village of Narborough – so footfall is quite low.
Historically main customer contact was by telephone
Small team – our remit is communications/marketing/design, web, CRM and digital transformation and all that it emcompasses. Includes procurement of software and solutions.
Our ICT Service is contracted out to Sopra Steria.
Web Developer and Web Admin is provided by Sopra Steria – shared across 3 authorities.
Developer 2 days a week. Web Admin just under 4 days a week
Vacant post – Transformation Officer – now looking for a developer
We went live with My Account January 2016, we have Council Tax account online, Book and pay for sporting activities through our local leisure centre and over 100 online forms live. 12,500 My Account subscribers
In terms of the website and how it manage it ….
The team have overall responsibility for the website, we set the strategy and do the day to day management. Ive listed just some of the things that, that involves.
Training staff + Training Guide which includes a style guide (page structure/headings/fonts/sentences/paragraphs
We create the pages and put them into the relevant part of the navigation structure
Integration work
Branding of 3rd party skins/portals
Moderate content
Services:-
Slowly starting to recognise that web has taken priority over phone calls!
Becoming more engaged in web. Want to get information on the site – used to take a bit of persuasion
Onto bulkies…
really pleased that we achieved 4* in Better Connected for our bulky waste service. No questions wrong! We also achieved 4* for Building Control and Single Person Discount
Put yourself in the shoes of the customer – sometimes I think its much easier for us to do that – services get a bit to close and bogged down with the detail.
When we moderate – has the service answered all the questions, if not talk to the service
We are looking at reviewing all our content as its to lengthy – our contract for the website expires next May so we may be replacing our CMS.
But keep the text short and sweet. We would suggest putting the link to the online form towards the top of the page (not below the fold)
We provide all trained staff with a website training and style guide.
Once we’ve got the page in place, we make sure page is
In the right place in the navigation
Put on all the relevant landing pages
Incorporated into the A-Z
We also use Google’s Custom Search and if we consider it to be a popular task – we enable promotions. Which will promote the result in the search.
So, that’s the page. The real winner for us is the online form.
Historically it was a spreadsheet.
We went live with the online form in 2014.
Launched the Firmstep CRM in November 2015 and bulkies was first process to be incorporated.
It’s a self contained process – no integration to back office system. Uses calculations and SQL database. Generates a report (pdf) which lists jobs for the day, its auto emailed to the depot for them to print and give to the crews.
It actually uses 4 forms.
We collect 12 items a day, when day is full we don’t show that date.
Calculations built into form so that 2 items = £20, 3 – 4 items = £28, 5 to 6 items = £40.00
Cut off point for ordering collection for next day (if date is available) is midnight.
SQL reporting service to generate report
Quote
Driver updates quote in our system, this triggers an email to the customer, if the customer wishes to accept the quote they click on a url within the email to proceed with the booking
They actually then start at the ‘Collection/Quote date’ part of the form – so they book in date of collection and then make payment.
The booking is then added to the usual pdf daily report to the depot.
Talk about amend booking. Customers can amend their booking – date, address, items to be collected.
We also have a bulky admin interface. Waste team can change
Number of collections per day (so if they want to do more or less than 12)
Put in non collection days
View the collections for particular dates – so if they wanted to see what was already booked in.
As a process it works really well for us. In fact our building control inspection bookings work in a similar way, as do a number of other processes.
Visits to our website
Desktop: 46.8%
Mobile: 38.4%
Tablet: 14.8%
What is interesting is that bulkies doesn’t follow this trend – mobile is most popular device for accessing/completing the bulky request form online.
We take approx 3,000 bulky requests a year.
Customers option logging into My Account complete the form or completing it anonymously (so it doesn’t prepopulate with all their details)
77% of customers choose to login
Figures flutuate but on average 50% of bookings are made online. I have to admit we have been focussing on Council Tax lately so havent really been pushing bulkies. But as you can see from the snapshot we have peaked at 83% of bulkies being done online at one stage.
Green shows online, red through CRM.
