Week ending: 14th July 2023
It’s been another busy couple of weeks on the Customer Service Programme and although we’ve had another round of Overview and Scrutiny Task and Finish Groups with the Executive Report tabled at Co-ordinating Overview & Scrutiny Committee today (Friday 14th July); our self-organising team has been focussed on the workstreams and here’s a snapshot of their work since our last update.
Please do reach out to the team if you wish to speak with us about any of the work we are doing: [email protected]
Customer panel
Refresh activities gather pace as we first seek feedback from our current panel on their experience over the past 12 months of engagement; whether their work on the panel has met their expectations; and how we can improve going forward. This will help inform the next iteration of the panel, and with the support of our Birmingham City Observatory colleagues, and the effective use of demographic data and insight for targeted activity planning, ensure our Customer Panel remains reflective of our diverse city.
Voice automation
The Discovery report findings and recommendations on the deployment of a voice automation solution has been approved by the SRO and Strategic Sponsor and a ‘go/no-go’ decision requested from Corporate Leadership Team. In the interim, planning for the immersion events has gone ahead, and on Wednesday 19th July, PwC will host events at their offices in Chamberlain Square for Contact Centre staff and key stakeholders. The 2-hour interactive sessions will provide real-time front and backstage scenarios of what life would be like if voice automation were to be deployed in BCC.
Culture change
A proposed approach for phase 2 culture change activities has been submitted by People Services and subsequently reviewed by the team; the next step will be approval by programme Steering Committee before rollout can commence.
Child Employment
We have completed the first round of user research by testing the first low fidelity prototype which has been developed in conjunction with the content experts to test the Chaperone application journey. The development of the prototype into a live solution will be completed in the coming weeks, with the next increment being the administrator functionality.
We continued desk research, focusing on research into chaperone applicant training to explore platforms currently used to deliver the training, understand the current offer based on previous research and get familiar with legislative requirements.
We held a Birmingham City Council wide show and tell where members of the delivery team provided an update on the work from the last couple of sprints. The session was well attended with lots of questions from colleagues wishing to understand the approach better. We thank Viki Sullivan (Head of Business Improvement and Support for Children and Families Directorate) for joining us and sharing her thoughts on how we have been working collaboratively with the Child Employment and Business Support teams to develop the Chaperones license user journey and prototype.
Content Team
The team have been busy on the roadmap for phase 2 of the content improvement work. Our content designers have iterated the content criteria used to assess the pages in scope; and have since completed a full review and inventory audit of Revenues, identifying a total of 178 pages of content for improvement (110 x Council Tax and 68 x Business Rates):
Playbacks have been scheduled to feedback the high-level findings and recommendations to the service leads. Once ways of working and timelines are agreed, the team will work with service leads to prioritise the content of the greatest value, based on user needs and the data and evidence from the analytics. In preparation for the content redesign (pair writing), the scope of the work has been estimated and t-shirt sized based on the information we have available.
Housing: the team have almost completed the content improvement work in scope for Housing with a few clean up exercises outstanding; and some follow up work on the HMO pages about changes in HMO status and rules around council tax.
Housing Tenant Satisfaction
Activities to date have enabled our service designers to create a problem visualization of the current world (‘as-is’) and begin to overlay the pain points, user needs, data/info queries and gaps, feedback triggers, dead ends and opportunities identified, to inform the future state development of the new world (‘to-be’).
The content designers have focused on the first iterations of the increment for Lettings, Allocations and Voids, and Estates Management, ensuring alignment with national standards from the Regulator of Social Housing. Some of the common RSH standards that cut across all areas of Housing includes, the council: listens to their tenants, keeps tenants informed, and treats tenants fairly and with respect.
We have worked with our SMEs to research the areas tenants should be surveyed about and liaised with the service to find out what kind of feedback would be useful for BCC.
Show and Tell
The slides with the highlights of our June show and tell can be found here.
This month’s internal BCC Show and Tell will be held on Thursday 27th July and will focus on the housing tenant satisfaction workstream.