Moving to the Web to save money only feasible if visitors can find what they need

“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 – but channel shift online will only work if sites work right first time and every time,” says Martin Greenwood, programme manager for the group's Insight consulting arm.

 

In the latest of the body's Customer Access Improvement Service programme audits, Greenwood and his team have delivered a downbeat assessment of moves to the Web by councils, claiming the channel is “not currently performing well enough to encourage the degree of channel shift required to impact significantly on councils’ costs of delivering information and services to customers”.

 

The analysis is based on performance data gleaned from results monitoring take up and performance of the most important customer access channels used by customers to access council services. 

 

It found that though cheaper for Town Halls to do – costing 32 pence per average Web enquiry versus  £2.90 per phone and £7.40 face-to-face – at the moment the Web is rated by the public using Socitm benchmarks as the least satisfactory of the three, with 42% of visitors rating it as poor, compared with 15% of face-to-face and just 1% phone query users.

 

The group says sites are still failing to offer what visitors seek in an easy-to-find way, with it claiming that on average (May 2010 figures) on average 20.74% of visitors failed to find what they were looking for online and that another 21.28% only found some of what they sought – or 32,000 dissatisfactory visits per month for single tier (or county) councils and up to 8,000 for shire districts. 

 

Worse – Socitm estimates up to £17m of extra cost is incurred by councils each month as visitors take additional enquiries to mediated channels that they might have ‘self-serviced’ online cheaper.

 

The group is calling for greater investment into local government websites to make sites more user-friendly so as to help curb costs.