Linking Total Place and Customer Led Transformation Programmes

Lesley Courcouf18 March 2010

Customer insight – the tools we have

• LAs and public sector partners collect lots of information about their locale and their communities including:

• Customer consultation and focus group insight• ‘Complaints, compliments and comments’• Mystery shopping exercises• Performance data • Service access data – across different channels• Demographic data• Indices of deprivation, • Frontline staff ‘intelligence’• Elected members ‘intelligence’, etc

• However, tend to use on a service by service basis within silos within each organisation separately.

2,860 households = 14.48%

3,955 households = 20.03%

3,454 households = 17.49%

3,850 households= 19.49%

The Community

So how does this help the Customer?

• Helps us see the customer in the round as opposed to a specific service user, e.g. the resident/parent/carer

• Helps us co-ordinate support – e.g. joint older people’s outreach team in Tameside

• Helps target vulnerable customers – e.g. FRS and Adult Social Care programme to reduce/prevent accidental fires in Kent and Hertfordshire

• Helps us design a more effective and efficient service around them, e.g. Tell Us Once

• Challenges professionals preconceptions

Drivers for customer engagement

• CAA* – asks customers about their experiences of local public service

• ‘Duty to involve’ i.e. get local citizens and services users involved in shaping local services

• Total Place approach* – work being done to join up services around particular customers e.g. older people, children, repeat offenders, drug and alcohol misusers,

• Cost to serve/Use of Resources / VFM – increasing pressures on finances so need to be efficient & make ‘hard’ decisions about what services we stop /ration and who delivers them, i.e. in-house staff or outsourced

• Customer expectations – citizens know their rights, many clearly research & they expect us to understand, anticipate and meet their needs professionally

Total Place & customer insight

• OEP: Recommendation for a “whole area” approach to public service delivery

• Aim: Delivering more with less, designed around the end user

• More radical thinking than traditional ‘silo’ approach. Focus on re-design in service delivery around the needs of the user creates much greater scope for efficiency savings AND service improvement

• Few examples of radical cross-agency customer centred service design

• TP looking to consolidate approaches across partners for a more coherent approach to target spend according to customer need, and reduce overall cost

Customer insight – some challenges

• Developing an information ‘culture’ and understanding/ exploiting what’s already available

• Being clear about the objectives & scope of any work• Selling the benefits to the organisation• Ensuring insight actually leads to reshaping of service

design and delivery• Finding the time, resources and skills, particularly in

smaller authorities• Sustainability – continuing the process on a daily basis• Working effectively with partners to develop insight jointly

Customer insight – the opportunities

• Strategic drive for ‘place shaping’/Total Place agenda• Supports enhanced local partnership working – across

different agencies, tiers, LSP and Total Place• More evidence-based decision making• Key element in improving customer satisfaction• Provides challenge to help develop more customer-

centric organisational cultures• Basis for more efficient operation – reducing ‘avoidable

contact’, channel shift and front office rationalisation• Can build a nationally consistent profiling resource to

inform local decision making and benchmarking

Tribal review of Total Place pilots Sept 09 - shows the effective use of customer insight is increasing

All pilots are using customer insight in some form or other, notably:

• Geo-demographic dataset analysis e.g. MOSAIC• Consultation and surveys• Customer journey mapping• Analysis of CRM and complaints data• User involved/led service design events• The creation of specific customer insight teams

And have produced some good customer-led analysis:• e.g. in Worcestershire 24 agencies dealing with NEETs –

confusion and duplication confirmed by consultations

All remain committed to continuing the use of customer insight.

Annual cost to the Public

Sector£87.2m

Annual contacts with Public

Sector31

Pieces of non-standard

information collected across all

contacts5

Drug and Alcohol Service

Local A&E for alcohol related

injuries

GP for management

of chronic condition

Pupil Referral unit for

sustained absenteeism

Youth Offender Unit

Housing and Council tax

Benefit

JobCentre Plus for

Incapacity Benefit or

JSA

Safer Neighbourhoo

d Team

School

Barnet, a parallel place identified the interaction between a family with multiple issues (2% of Barnet’s population) and the public sector.

Pilots using customer insight have identified a similar patterns of duplication and also gaps

that arise from a lack of flexibility locally

• Bradford identified the potential to streamline 5 - 10 different assessments for ex-offenders into a single common assessment – they also found that for NEETs in care there were no funding streams or flexibilities in programmes and benefits to meet the needs of these young people at important transitional points in their life;

• Croydon has redesigned single approach to family support from pre-natal care to early years to support better parenting from the outset and target on-going engagement;

• Lewisham found that the needs of the long-term unemployed are rarely met by one agency; Luton similarly found evidence of duplication between agencies.They suggest a single benefit team for the area drawing on experience of the CAB;

• Bournemouth, Dorset and Poole identified ways of reshaping community services around ‘safe, secure and healthy’ advisors to support the aspiration of local people to remain independent and stay in their own homes for as long as possible.

Total Place conclusions. Strong solutions were evidenced by working with people to understand their needs and their experiences. This allowed pilots to propose improvements to service quality as well as identify where waste can be avoided.

Next steps

• Total Place demonstrates putting citizens at heart of service design enhances opportunities to deliver better services

• CLG/IDeA report ‘Customer Insight: through a Total Place lens’

• Publicise support for local government and partners to use and share customer insight more effectively

• Work between sectors to embed customer insight and make it ‘business as usual’.