Senior content designer Eleanor Shakeshaft and senior service designer Ibarieze Abani from the APHA improving customer experience team discuss how they’re improving the way customers get support when they can't find the answers they need online.
In our team’s first blog post, we explained our choice of tools and technology. Here, we zoom in further to look at how workshopping with colleagues in customer service teams has been instrumental in shaping how we build a more sustainable service.
To recap, our team’s goals are to:
help customers to find the answer to their question in GOV.UK guidance before contacting APHA make it easier for customers who do need to contact APHA to find the right team give our Customer Service Centre (CSC) teams the tools and information they need to resolve queries more efficiently make better use of data and insights from customer contact Simplifying the journey to get helpWhen customers need support from APHA, there are two steps in their journey:
Finding the right team to contact. Getting in touch.Historically, these journeys could be difficult to navigate. Customers were often presented with long lists of email addresses and contact routes, leaving them to decide which team could help.
65% of APHA's customer emails were sent to the wrong team and needed to be redirected. This was a poor experience for customers who had to wait longer for a reply and was an inefficient use of time for CSC teams.
To address this, we've focused on both stages of the experience.
Helping customers find the right teamOne of the main entry points for users needing support is the page previously known as Contact APHA.
This page is now titled Get help with animal and plant health. We renamed it because research showed this wording was more intuitive to users.
We're also testing a user-centred routing tool that helps people find the right team based on what they're trying to do.
It uses familiar language and does the hard work of getting customers to the right team, instead of expecting them to understand APHA's internal structure.
This makes it quicker and easier for customers to get the help they need.
Making it easier to get in touchThe biggest change to customers is replacing many of APHA's email addresses with contact forms.
Moving away from email to contact forms and a Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) platform has several benefits, including:
using structured contact forms means customers will provide the information needed so we can answer their question on the first try questions go to the right team the first time, reducing redirection and duplication enabling APHA to use insights from metrics and structured data to inform policy and operational decisions APHA teams will have a more efficient workflow with appropriate software designed to handle a large amount of queriesHowever, delivering this change at scale presented a challenge.
A large number of services and contact routes were in scope. We needed a way to design and roll out forms at pace, without creating entirely bespoke solutions for every team.
Learning from a pilot approachWe started with a pilot in Alpha, working closely with two service areas: pet travel and customer advice.
This allowed us to:
explore their existing processes understand the services they deliver identify the information they need from customers get early evidence to validate (or invalidate) the approach deliver benefits quicklyThe pilot approach gave us valuable insight into how different teams worked. But it quickly became clear it wouldn't be an efficient way to deliver contact forms at scale.
The early forms were highly tailored to individual services. This required significant collaboration and refinement to accommodate complex policy needs.
We also discovered many CSC teams handle a broader range of work than expected, including specialist applications and processes.
Stepping back to see the bigger pictureTo create a more scalable solution, we took a step back and looked across the wider CSC landscape.
Through workshops with teams, we explored:
the processes and operating contexts of different service areas similarities in how teams worked common information requirements needed to resolve customer queries opportunities for standardisationThis helped us move from designing individual forms to designing a reusable pattern.
We combined the insights from these workshops with a set of design principles and practical constraints. For example, limiting the number of fields in the first iteration of a form.
The end result was a contact form pattern that could be applied across multiple services,
Taking this approach has allowed us to co-design with teams and publish forms more efficiently and sustainable, without compromising on quality and consistency for customers.
A pattern in action: reporting a farm animal welfare concernOne example of this approach can be seen in the 'Report a farm animal welfare concern' service.
Although this service sits slightly outside the scope of the wider ‘getting help’ work, it is an important priority area for APHA. Given the scope and timelines, designing a service entirely from scratch wasn't practical.
Instead, we looked at other similar Defra services to identify patterns we could reuse.
Patterns gave us:
a proven starting point that could be adapted to meet specific service needs reusable components that had already been tested with customers a faster route to delivery greater consistency across servicesRather than reinventing the wheel, we were able to build on existing good practice and focus our effort on aspects unique to the service.
Designing for the futureThis work is about more than replacing inboxes with forms.
We’re adding patterns and components like this to the Defra Digital service manual to be reused by other teams. This will reduce the time and resources needed to design from scratch for similar services.
This approach supports Defra's ambitions to invest in reusable products and common platforms, rather than creating one-off solutions for individual programmes.
This will enable us to improve user experience, scale delivery, reduce duplication and improve consistency across Defra.
More informationEleanor Shakeshaft is a Senior content designer and Ibarieze Abani a senior service designer with the APHA improving customer experience team .
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seen at 14:49, 12 August in Defra digital, data and technology.