What is the current process?

It is essential you understand how you are delivering and people are accessing services now so that you can examine that against what you know about your customers. This then enables you to plan how you can change that to make customer service improvements or efficiency savings.

It is essential you do this process mapping starting from the customer and their first point of contact – or even earlier if you are looking at the full customer journey from first becoming aware of the service. At each stage you need to map:

• Who is involved – the customer, officers, intermediaries such as friends, other professionals or councillors
• What is being communicated – requesting information, providing information
• What is the channel being used – phone, face to face, email or online form, paper document
• Are there any ICT/e-government systems involved for data to be entered or accessed
• Are there permissions being granted or eligibility criteria being applied and if so how is that happening (what questions are being asked and what happens with different answers)

In this last question you need to build in any feedback loops – for example going back to the customer and asking for more information – as well as requests for data or verification from outside agencies.

It is also key that you look at what happens to let the customer know what you have done – have you told them the service has been delivered and asked if it was ok?

A guide to process mapping  from the Smart Cities Regional Academic Network is http://www.smartcities.info/files/Smart_Cities_Research_Brief_Process_Mo...

And another guide is at www.institute.nhs.uk/option.com/joomcart/Itemid,26/main page,document product info/products id,295.html

What can be improved

There are a number of things you can do to achieve the improvements in customer services or efficiency outlined above. These are:

• Encouraging greater take up by targeted marketing
• Encouraging customers to use cheaper channels by targeted marketing (and making sure those channels deliver what they want) – Channel Shift
• Improving the process by reducing steps or automating part of the process
• Improving access by delivering a more joined up “one stop” service across the local authority or partnerships through all channels (generally based on ensuring information and service requests are online and information is grouped around the needs of specific customer groups)
• Encouraging customers to change their behaviour so they need less or less costly services (social marketing)

If you use the techniques outlined above to describe the desired scenario for customers accessing your services you can map that against the actual customer journey/process map to see how it differs. Remember to keep focussed on your business question, although you may get ideas for other improvements which you can either add on to the project or develop as a further project.

Building the business case

Once you have decided what it is you want to achieve you should build a business case – even if this is at a very summary level for those projects involving small groups and small amounts of money. A template is attached.

Remember the benefits you identified in the Balanced Scorecard and make sure you refer to these in the Business case. You may not be able to quantify all of those benefits but try and do as many as possible as this will help sell the project to key stakeholders.