LCCITS140020 Cross Council Web Chat System.

Descriptions

Leeds City Council see Channel Shift (supporting customers to self-serve) as a key driver for both savings and improving the customer experience. The key ‘channel' for self-service is to be the website. Accordingly, Leeds City Council (LCC) sees supporting customers in their navigation of the website as vital for the transition to self-service.The Digital Access Team (DAT) has provided a web chat service to customers using the www.leeds.gov website. Web chat proactively engages with customers, while they are in the process of searching for information. Triggers are used to identify where a customer may be struggling to find information and then intervening to offer assistance via web chat, to help them before they take up a different method of contact (i.e. Face to Face, email or phone). By pro-actively engaging with customers while they are already online, we can then assist them with their enquiry – deflecting a more expensive phone call or email, and giving them confidence to do it themselves next time. The right software can intelligently identify when a visitor is in need of help, and offer a web chat automatically to them. Through clicking to accept the chat a visitor will be immediately connected with a Customer Service Officer (CSO) who helps them complete their enquiry online.The DAT operate a team of ten staff with in the Contact Centre to engage with visitors on the Leeds.gov website who meet a trigger that initiates an invite to web chat.Having seen the successes of web chat in the Contact Centre there has been interest from other council services in using this approach. The Business Support Centre (BSC) and Information Communication Technology (ICT) have expressed an interest in using the software in their service areas to communicate with staff on a secure platform, both internally and externally.The project will deliver:— a secure software solution that can be used can be used to chat with our customers online and assist them in finding the information on our web site, enabling them to self-serve in the future reducing the volume of phone and email contact to the council and thereby reducing costs to the council,— an easy to use software that is accessible to administrators 24/7,— the capability to securely store web chat transcripts both on internal and external storage systems,— secure web chat platform that will ensure data protection regulations are complied with,— secure web chat platform which meets UK Public Sector Security Standards across all aspects,— the facility to offer end of chat customer surveys and the ability to analyse results,— a robust data management system that will generate comprehensive management reports regarding web chat statistics. This will include the ability to extract key data and monitor trends for forecasting.