DL1: Digital Engagement Conference Report

DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT CHANNEL SHIFT

ASSISTED DIGITAL

DIGITAL ORGANISATIONS

DL1: Digital Engagement Conference Report

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Download the Conference Booklet and Conference Report at http://www.issuu.com/ CivicAgenda

Presentations given at Digital Engagement are available on http://slideshare.com/ DigiLeaders

BACKGROUND Technology has the potential to dramatically change the relationship between Government and citizens: the Government’s commitment to a Channel Shift to ‘digital by default’ public services is set to revolutionise how citizens transact with Government while the new single domain is transforming the pathways through which citizens access these services.

Speaking earlier this year, Mike Bracken of GDS said “The transaction layer is a much bigger ask, as we have to go to the technology stack, look at the integrated service delivery, look at contact centres – that is the future challenge for GDS.” The Digital Leaders: Digital Engagement event challenged leaders throughout central and local Government to understand and tackle the challenges, real and perceived that digital offers, for improving how they serve their multi-channel citizens, and address the barriers to them doing so.

Key Themes: • • •

Digital Engagement – Citizens trust of digital transactions – lessons, good practice and cross-sector solutions for transacting digitally with customers Multichannel customers – how industry delivers user-centric, multi-channel services - cutting across back office systems, internet safety and the user experience.

Underpinning both of these - Assisted Digital - for harder to reach groups at a local level, and how assisted digital channels for offline users still remains key.

The event drew upon the lessons and stories from industry of how they have overcome the cross cutting challenges of serving ever-changing customer needs and channel shifting behaviours to deliver seamless transactions and interconnected back offices. It also confronted the crucial issue of ensuring that everyone is able to engage with Government to access essential public services, and that no voices are excluded from the digital conversation.

Around 80 senior decision or policy makers from Whitehall, Local Authorities, NGOs and industry attended Digital Engagement.

The event started with a hot lunch and a networking opportunity.

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SESSION REPORT Plenary session: Digital Engagement: Tiffany St James, Stimulation Ltd. ‘Digital Engagement’ often has an ‘inclusion’ meaning associated with it, but this was widened out to encompass a wider citizen engagement with digital services. Tiffany St James, founder of Stimulation Ltd, was the first keynote speaker and examined the issues around citizen engagement, trust and social government.

Tiffany talked of the good practice in government in this area, but that the technology landscape has changed has changed who we, as citizens, trust. Trust is shown to be closest in ‘family and friends’ and ‘social media friends’, but there has been a shift in trust by roles, with a ‘person like yourself’ rising in trust, while trust in government has dropped. Government needed therefore to become more social to restore its trust.

Tiffany continued that infographics have increased our demands on information providers, and the acceptance of that information, while social media has been built into organisational communications. There are numerous high profile examples of social media being used as a channel by police to engage with community, and of campaigns on multiple channels, for example No10 who now uses a wide array of social media platforms.

Government has also had to be more responsive and collaborative in policy making. Co-creation, discussion and policy consultations though crowd-sourcing in online places where people go, for example Mumsnet, are now considered to be ideal. And ‘digital’ as a channel is now used widely in government: HR, internal communications, marketing, transactions, customer service and business intelligence. Tiffany asked how government can be more customer centric, giving examples of models of trust indicators and further ways to build trust. Finally Tiffany gave advice to the audience to look closely at their digital offer, and consider what they need to do next.

A number of questions from the floor followed, asking if more digital engagement leads to greater investment, if social media excludes voices from the less included, and disproportionately uses up resources with a vocal minority? And with respect to the ethics of social government, how are citizens protected from social media engagement with government? Tiffany surmised that while online listening and collaborative policymaking is valuable, there is a need to balance the resources required and build safe frameworks for response, for which there are many good examples.

Tiffany St James

Helen Milner

David Mortimer

Manjeet Gill

Panel discussion: Digital Engagement There is also a significant task for Local Authorities and NGOs to support citizens to use new online government services, and be more engaged with Government, and so we invited a panel from UK online centres, Age UK and West Lindsey District Council to add their voices to the discussion.

Helen Milner, CEO, UK online centres Helen started by reminding the audience that its much more of a ‘how’ than an ‘if’ for digital engagement. UK online centres therefore have already become much more social, doing far less formal Press Releases, and far more social media its about news and activities. Those who use the internet ‘a little’ are estimated to be about 20m people in UK, and so these are a very significant target group to ensure that ‘social government’ is properly democratic.

UK online centres works with around 3,800 hyperlocal partners, and everything is now done online. UK online centres reached its target of helping 1m people to get online in June 2012, with a cost of £30m over three years, the savings of £157m dwarf the investment. The economic impact argument is also becoming more powerful with 51% of those supported

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SESSION REPORT to get online, now swapping face to face interactions with government for online interactions. And it isn’t just straight channel shift economics, as there are a range of other social and health impacts. Helen gave a case study of someone who lost significant weight as a result of getting online, with significant health service savings possible from bringing people online and into contact with health agencies and the support they offer.

Manjeet Gill, CEO, West Lindsey District Council Manjeet asked what the are drivers for Local Authorities? They used to have a range of performance indicators that would measure engagement, but radical transformation is needed to enable financial challenges, with value for money and efficiency as key factors.

Universal Credit is a key service looking forwards that Local Authorities will need to support. West Lindsey District Council is a pilot authority for Universal Credit, and they are looking at how they can provide the tools to help people help themselves.

They are creating Community Champions to support people to use support online resources, and help build the infrastructure to enable community engagement. Their approach is one of ‘assisted self-service’: helping people to help themselves.

David Mortimer, Head of Digital Inclusion, Age UK Age UK will carry out digital engagement anyway with older people walking into their centres asking for support. There will also be a rural challenge that will be doubly impacted by limited public transport and rising petrol costs. Additionally, the current economic circumstances will affect delivery and support provided. There will be a cultural change needed to by local authorities and other NGOs to build this support offering.

There was a final question from the floor asking the panel to define “Assisted Digital”. The collective response was helping someone to use digital services, but not just in a face to face environment, and understanding in an empathetic way, what they want to achieve.

Ashley Machin

Simon Elliott

Graeme Stewart

Graham Walker

Plenary: Multi-Channel Customers, Ashley Machin, Lloyds Banking Group After coffee and more networking the second plenary focused on Multi-Channel Customers, and explored how industry has dealt with developing digital services for customers, and how it has already tackled many of the issues the Government is facing in identity assurance, security, back office integration to deliver a seamless multi channel service to customers, many of whom who now change their digital channels without even thinking about the systems that are in place to make this happen for them. That only happens when great thought and effort has gone into making it seamless.

Ashley Machin, Director of Digital Banking from Lloyds Banking Group talked around the key success factors, and the issues and pitfalls, and the other issues around identity assurance, and building customer trust.

Ashley talked of the Lloyds Bank journey over the last six years, with a team of 25 growing to 1000, and with customers growing from 4m to 9.3m. It was not a cost cutting exercise, but an exercise that allows customers to access Lloyds in ways they wanted to. Usage and frequency is very high with financial services, but with government citizens do things more infrequently, so there will be a challenge to build ‘stickiness’.

There will always be things that are thrown in the way of plan for example the HBOS/ LTSB merger, but Ashleys’ advice will always be to stay focused on the customer. Government has the advantage of a huge customer base, however while Lloyds isn’t compared to Nat West, but to Amazon, Apple or Google, it will be the same for Government.

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SESSION REPORT Absolute security of identity is ‘old school’, and is more of an exercise of probability, and in trying to be absolute a service doesn’t recognise how customers see security. Mobile banking now accounts for 31% of activity, but there are a plethora of mobile platforms that cannot all be included. Most people start with desktop and move to mobile. It is possible to be transfixed with the changing technology, but it needs to be reflected in design of services. Lloyds will write all in HTML5 and then build a wrapper for App stores There were a range of questions from the floor. Ashley felt there is no sense of ‘digital’ being a threat to employment within Lloyds, in fact its more a shortage of human capability that will be the threat. And with respect to online health services, ‘gamification’ could be built into Apps to attract online users. Ashley has line of sight reduction of telephony and face-toface services, in favour of online services, but was not sure there is any value in having a discussion about switching off call centres. Finally Ashley was asked if banks may ever allow government to use their identity verification? His response was there needs to be vertical integration in identity verification, and this must be technically possible.

Panel Discussion A panel from industry was invited to join Ashley to explore how digital engagement and channel shift has worked for industry Graeme Stewart, Director of Public Sector Strategy and Relations, UK&I McAfee Graeme explained that we as consumers of technology trust the technology that we have will be safe and secure. We need to make sure that we don’t breach trust in the design of services, platforms or products as most people don’t care how security works, but they do care when it goes wrong. He explained that it needs to be ‘baked’ into every offering just as health and safety is now baked into every building site. If safety and security goes wrong people revert to old ‘safe’ channels.

Simon Elliott, Head of Digital Strategy, Atos Simon spoke on how the user experience has to be high quality, or your marketing promotion will be wasted, and that the user experience is dynamic and changes with the technology. With a simple photograph Simon explained that the path of least resistance is always the route the customer will take, so don’t expect the customer to conform to your preferred routes. Building user experience requires whole groups of staff to adopt a new understanding. Organisational cultural change to get user experience correct is vital.

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