Councils failing to deliver adequate online services

Local councils are failing to deliver internet services effectively, says Socitm

Local councils are not delivering internet services well enough, according to public sector IT leaders body Socitm.

In a new report, Socitm warns that councils are failing to encourage customers to shift to using the web to the extent required to significantly cut their costs of delivering information and services.

The finding is based on data collected from Socitm’s latest Customer Access Improvement Service briefing. It provides results from three different services that monitor take-up and performance of the most important channels that customers use to access council services.

The services are: Socitm’s Website Takeup service, Channel Value Benchmarking service and the GovMetric service.

The latest data from the Channel Value Benchmarking service states that the comparative cost to councils per enquiry are: £7.40 for face-to-face, £2.90 for the telephone and just £0.32 for web enquiries.

However, the GovMetric service’s data shows that, despite being the busiest channel, the web gives by far the least satisfactory performance. Some 42 per cent of visitors rated it as poor, compared with 15 per cent of face-to-face visitors and just 1 per cent of callers by phone.

The main reason for dissatisfaction with the web is failure of visitors to find what they are looking for, said Socitm. The body added that this is likely to lead to significant levels of “avoidable contact” as visitors go to other, more expensive channels, predominantly the phone, for answers to their enquiries.

Soctim’s Website Takeup service shows that in May 2010 on average 21 per cent of visitors failed to find what they were looking for on the web and that another 21 per cent only found part of what they were looking for.

This equates to up to 32,000 failed web visits per month for county councils and up to 8,000 for shire districts. Socitm estimates that these figures equate to up to £17m extra cost to councils each month, as visitors take additional enquiries to other channels that they might have ‘self-serviced’ on the web.

“Our data continues to show how much cheaper the web channel can be than going through an intermediary, such as the phone call or the visit to the one-stop shop,” said Martin Greenwood, programme manager for Socitm Insight.

“However, channel shift online will only work if web sites work right first time and every time. Under-investment in the web is the cause of its current low performance and this needs to change.”