Recently we were asked to review a council department’s arrangements for providing information about its services to users, including residents and organisations, in all its forms – written, telephone, and online and by word of mouth through professional staff

Information provision is a service, and needs performance managing just as much as any other service.  In this case, management, and therefore resources, were fragmented across the department, so there was no clear strategy or specified outcomes and no‑one was looking at information as a whole.  So there were opportunities for improving the impact of the service and also making efficiency savings.

The way information was provided seemed to depend on organisational constraints, rather than the needs of the user/customer.  So, for example, not all incoming telephone calls could be transferred to the appropriate person.  Sometimes this is unavoidable but it does produce inefficiencies and an incomplete customer service.

This particular department did not have a channel strategy and had not analysed its market and the information needs.  Also, although information about incoming phone calls and web site use was available, it was not being used effectively to enable people who require services to make informed choices

Usually information is not needed until it is needed so this is a situation where learning from users can be invaluable.  Indeed, asking for input from current and previous users to designing information can be very revealing.  Jargon and professional language are usually barriers to understanding and it is difficult, at times, for information providers to put themselves in the position of the user.

Perhaps the most worrying finding was that information accessed via the internet was not consistent – depending on the route taken, the user could receive different information or even no information at all.

So providing information about services is an vital part of the whole process and too often it is not treated with sufficient importance by senior management as does not receive the attention it requires – especially in an era when choice matters.

LCS has many years expertise in customer services and we have experience of undertaking critiques of web sites and written information, mystery shopping, and user feedback design and analysis – but all of this is part of a whole system and unless the ‘whole’ functions effectively then there is only limited benefit in fixing the ‘part’!.