The digital strategy we published in November 2020 paves the way for the modernisation of the council. A major part of the strategy involves changes in Customer Services, specifically to:

• transform the work of our customer services team, reducing their administrative burden and focusing them on supporting the digitally excluded and vulnerable

• explore different channels for customer services, including chat and text 

• design and deliver an assistive technology care strategy (to be published later), to help our more vulnerable and older residents achieve the best possible quality of life 

• implement a best in class contact centre and telephony system, ensuring residents can contact and hear from the council reliably and consistently

• integrate our social media queries and communication into customer services

In addition to the changes described at a high level in the digital strategy, we have spent two years managing customer services through a pandemic. During this time, we have learnt a huge amount about how to offer the most efficient service at extremely high volume; about opportunities to centralise services and work more closely with the rest of the council and, most of all, that our residents expect more from us than ever before. 

It is these reasons which have prompted us to write this strategy. It builds on and deepens the initial thoughts in the digital strategy and widens these out to cover what we've learnt through the COVID pandemic. In it, we describe the strategy for change in customer services from 2022 to 2025.