London Borough of Waltham Forest

My Account self-service improvements

Throughout the UK local authorities are under pressure to deliver more with less, with many focussed on driving channel shift from traditional expensive channels (call centre and face-to-face) to digital.

A resident’s online ‘My Account’ is their single access point to all council interactions they can make online, as well as get updates on previously submitted queries.  So it’s incredibly important that the customer experience of using ‘My Account’ is fast, simple and intuitive.

Today our My Account platform has low approval ratings and provides limited functionality. In September 2018 78.4% of respondents to our GovMetrics survey rated My Account as ‘poor’ for ease of use and 40.5% said ‘they would not return’.

Following a three month discovery we have developed proposals to improve the functionality of My Account to make it a more useful and beneficial platform for both residents and council, including:

1. Updating ‘My requests’ functionality to show real-time progress/updates on submitted tasks.
2. Surfacing popular service information personalised to the resident such as bin collection days in their neighbourhood, and displaying details of their local MP and Councillor with the option to contact.
3. Surfacing popular tasks.

We will work with Coventry City Council to further prototype, test and build these proposals.

Discovery evidence

We completed a three month Discovery that helped us understand the current frustrations our residents have with their My Account, what a best-in-class experience looks like (competitive analysis) and the key reasons a resident or logs into My Account today (opportunities).

During the Discovery period we recruited 96 local residents to join a ‘digital user testing group’ that we engaged with numerous times using online surveys, online user testing tasks and face-to-face panels to fully explore the issues experienced today with our My Account offering and the opportunities we should prioritise moving forward.

Alongside this research we worked collaboratively with our platform provider Firmstep to understand opportunities with existing functionality and technically what was possible in the future.

Following research and a data deep-dive we prototyped ideas, engaging with our digital testers again to further test functionality improvement ideas, user journeys, navigation changes and UI changes.

Our proposed improvements to My Account will benefit all local authorities who use the Firmstep platform and their local residents around the UK.