MCA Awards 2004
Platinum Award: Overall Winner
PA Consulting Group; client - Westminster City Council
Transforming customer services departments of any organisation from a hard-to-navigate labyrinth to a user-friendly one-stop call centre sounds next to impossible. But Westminster City Council did it - with the help of PA
It’s a common problem. “I’m sorry, you’ve been put through to the wrong department.” To their customers, large organisations often seem to be a labyrinth. Getting to talk to someone who can help can take determination - and patience.
When Westminster City Council called in PA Consulting Group to help them develop a new contact centre - and make better use of the internet, as Whitehall’s 'e-government' targets require - they decided to stand back and think about what Westminster’s 200,000 citizens want when they pick up their phone, a pen, or their mouse, to contact the council.
“The methodology was to say, ‘what can we do to rethink this whole business model? Let’s think it through from a customer point of view’,” says Rob Brown, PA’s assignment manager on the project.
If basic inquiries could be dealt with in a centralised customer services centre, without Westminster residents having to work out exactly which department of the council they needed, the team decided, then customers would get a better service - and Westminster could save money. “The way to really make use of e-government was not to think of it department by department,” says Rob. “As a customer, what you want is some information.”
Westminster City Council’s chief executive, Peter Rogers, who chaired the steering group which helped to push the project through, puts it simply: “In essence, it was about making the council easier to deal with.” The stated aim of the project, then, was “to improve significantly the quality of our customers’ experience when they contact Westminster City Council, and to reduce, over time, the cost per customer contact.”
Instead of simply bolting a call centre on to the existing organisational structure, PA and the council decided to take the opportunity to rethink fundamentally how the council dealt with the public. As a result, they set about designing the 'T-shaped organisation'.
The horizontal top-stroke of the T is the customer-facing part of an integrated 'front office' for the council, which Westminster citizens can contact by phone, post, email, or in person. The trained agents in the front office can answer basic queries immediately; or guide clients through finding the information they need. “It’s a means of empowering a customer services function which is to act as an expert guide, a mediator and an advocate with the rest of the organisation,” explains Rob Brown. If the caller goes on to ask a second, unrelated question, which in the past would have required them to be passed on to a different part of the council, the customer service agents can help them.
In the vertical downstroke of the T are more staff, who process payments, issue licences, commission services from the council’s various departments and suppliers, and so on, to fulfil the public’s requests. Applications for many council services could then be accepted online.
Computer-aided modelling suggested the new system could generate considerable cost-savings and deal with more queries, more quickly. Once that T-shaped structure had been decided on, the separate departments of the council had to be reengineered to service it - a process which is still going on. But Peter Rogers says the new structure benefitted the separate departments, because it freed them from spending time answering hundreds of very basic enquiries, and helped them deliver their core services more effectively.
With a number of the council’s services already outsourced, the project team decided to bring in a private sector provider to set up and run the customer services centre, in one of the largest public sector procurement projects ever.
“It was just the most effective strategy for delivering the change. It made sense strategically and in terms of investment. If you found the right supplier, that removed a whole set of issues,” says Rob Brown. With considerable procurement expertise already in-house at Westminster, PA then helped them to choose a supplier, Vertex, and supported the process of persuading as many of the council’s existing staff as possible to move over to the private firm. Having a model of how the centre would operate helped the council to put together a detailed specification for the contract, including ways of measuring Vertex’s performance.
Westminster’s T-shaped customer service centre has now been up and running since November 2002, and already handles 66 different services, from library book renewals and parking fines to council tax payments. In its first year of operation, it took more than a million calls, answering three-quarters of them within the first 20 seconds. Perhaps more importantly, 94% of callers reported that they were satisfied with the way their queries had been dealt with - compared to below 40% before the project began.
Over almost two years, the delivery of the call centre project slipped by just six weeks, a fact which Peter Rogers sees as indicative of how well it was managed, through a series of joint teams involving both PA and council staff. Cost savings are expected to be more than £80m over 15 years.
One of the things which most impressed the Awards’ judges about this project was the fact that this radical organisational change, which so far appears to have been very successful, was brought about in the public sector. “They demonstrated they had transformed the way the council thought about and organised itself to deliver services to its citizens,” said Hugh Barrett, chief executive of OGC Buying Solutions and a member of the judging panel. “There’s an element of recognition that to do this sort of change in a public sector organisation is more difficult than in a private organisation.”
Rob Brown agrees that, “the challenge of change in the public sector is a bigger one. You can’t argue you’re going to go bust if you don’t do it - you have to work hard at persuading people.” There was already established best practice in the private sector for this type of project, but transferring it to a council required new ways of thinking. But Rob Brown says a close partnership with the council helped to deliver that. “Peter Rogers recognised that this was a transformation project, as well as a change one: it involved completely new ways of working.”
Other local councils, and even Whitehall departments, have already begun to draw lessons from what Westminster has done, and both PA and the council are evangelistic about the benefits of this kind of reorganisation for other parts of government. “This is something which is utterly germane to the modernisation of government,” says Rob Brown. “It’s a helpful model for local government because of the sheer multitude of services that it provides.” Peter Rogers says: “The government has shown a lot of interest in what we have done. We see it as a blueprint for the way public services should operate.”
Westminster’s residents may not be interested in the nuts and bolts of the T-shaped organisation, or whether their council’s contact-centre becomes a model for the rest of government. But they must be delighted that spending half an hour on the phone only to be told they’ve been 'put through to the wrong department' is a thing of the past.
