To deliver effective changes within your council, it’s important to understand the behaviours, needs, and frustrations of your service users who could be residents, internal staff, or partner organisations. This understanding ensures that your solutions meet their needs.

This activity is designed for small-scale research, helping you gain insights into a high volume of people interacting with your service. Once completed, you’ll be able to identify opportunities for improvement.

When to get insights from listening to calls

You can complete this activity any time you want to learn what to do next. For example, learning more about the experience of residents to address any pain points.

It can be helpful if you:

  • want to champion research activities when your organisation is dealing with a lot of different priorities
  • have limited access to a research team or resources
  • want to influence decision making in your organisation by demonstrating the benefits of starting from user needs for the service and the business

You can do this on a regular basis, not just at the start of a project. All stakeholders should observe user research frequently. Listening to calls is a quick and inexpensive way to get exposure to your service users.

Other ways include:

How to get insights from listening to calls

Use the questions in the resource to:

  • define your research goals
  • document your observations during the exercise

Start with a good plan

Before you get started, you should think about what you want to learn from the research.

Try to understand:

  • who are the people using your service
  • what you know already and what you do not or are unsure about
  • what key questions you have for them about the service they’re using

You can also do a root cause analysis to understand the reasons why your users might experience certain problems.

Make any ethical considerations

Consider the permissions you’ll need internally and from the people you’ll be observing.

You should:

  • check with the relevant teams within your organisation that they are happy for you to listen to their calls
  • explain your goals for the day and how you plan to use the learnings gained from this activity
  • reassure them this is not about monitoring their performance

This will help clarify your intentions and motivate them to contribute their experience.

If you are going to engage with people outside your organisation, consider if you’ll need a consent form. For more information, read GOV.UK guidance on getting informed consent for user research.

What you can do next

Analyse the insights and create a summary report.

Use the insights to identify opportunities that address the problems you’ve learned about.

Share the knowledge

Do not keep all the learnings to yourself. Make them accessible, actionable, and useful for current and future projects. It does not have to be within your council only. Sharing it allows other councils to learn about people’s needs. The Localgov.digital user research library is a good example of how to share findings within and across councils.

Continue updating the repository with new user research findings to keep it relevant and up-to-date.

Inform decisions

Share any learnings with stakeholders and other service teams in your organisation. This creates a common understanding of people’s needs and behaviours. You can make a case for testing assumptions and ideas before committing to a solution. For example:

You can recreate this resource in a format that suits you.

  1. Pick a service area that has a manageable volume of calls and is specific enough to learn about. For example, within housing, you might look at repairs.
  2. Think about who you can speak to set up call listening. This could be a contact centre manager or decision makers involved in change.
  3. Define what you want to achieve with this exercise. For example, to share real user experience with decision makers.
  4. Ahead of the date, write down some questions you hope to answer during the exercise. For example, why people are calling instead of using online services.
  5. Create a board or table to record any notes during the call.
  6. In the board or table, create a row for each call. Then create columns for things that will help you understand more about the people using the service and where you might improve it. For example, the user, their goals, what went wrong or well, how they felt and the impact on the outcome of the call.
  7. You can also record any interesting quotes or general notes.
  8. Add any data or statistics that help to add context to your findings. For example, the number of calls this service gets, average call duration, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data about call outcomes, and satisfaction metrics.

Tips for this activity

During this activity, you should:

  • keep notes anonymous – do not record personal details
  • record facts, not your opinions
  • work together with call handlers – it’s about improving digital services, not monitoring performance
  • focus on the experience of callers
  • check that callers know they may be monitored and that your data protection officer approves
  • keep it concise – you do not need to capture everything
  • listen to the calls with an open mind – you do not need to know what the problems are yet or think of any solutions