London Borough of Southwark

Over 50% of Pest Control enquiries in Southwark are follow-ups, or requests for information. Fewer than 10% of all enquiries come in through our online form.

To understand how to design a better pest control service for customers, we did a 3 month discovery exercise. We spoke to staff, call centre operatives and mapped end to end as-is processes. We did customer research and developed personas and customer journey maps, identifying pain points in the existing process.

We have proposed new customer journey taking into account our research, and would like to take this through to an alpha stage, developing a prototype of this service and iterating the design by testing it with real users.

We will work in partnership with the London Borough of Croydon, who contract Southwark to operate its Pest Control services. They will be involved in testing and design iterations. The resulting live online service would be available to Croydon to use on its own customer platform.

We will publish:

• Research data & discovery findings
• Analogous research of other LA Pest Control services we used as inspiration
• Design iterations, sketches, wireframes and testing insights
• Alpha site and code

Discovery evidence

Our 12 week discovery aimed to understand why customers prefer phone over online, and why so many calls result in follow-ups and complaints. We conducted user interviews and used insights from customer feedback and complaints to find out how users feel about the service and determine user needs.

Some pain points we discovered are:

• Lack of up front information and poorly designed webform results in preference to call
• Call centre scripts are system driven resulting in confusing customer experience and incorrect diagnosis
• Lack of integrated data (such as housing tenure type, job history) leads to mistakes and complexity
• Some customers are not asked to pay when they should – resulting in follow-up work for backoffice staff
• No appointment reminders, a high number of no-access repeat visits. Reducing this would benefit operatives who are paid per job completion

Our digital team of 1x service designer, 1x BA, 1x user researcher and 1x UX Manager, alongside 10 officers in Pest Control and Customer Services have concluded that an alpha project is needed to develop a new online process on our existing web platform, simplifying the existing solution and resulting in significant revenue savings and customer benefits.