With the aim of ensuring that the customer experience for both citizens and
businesses when contacting their local council is one which is responsive,
timely and efficient, the Government has proposed the collection of statistics
on ‘avoidable contact’ as a National Indicator – NI 14.
As described by the first release (February 2008) of the National Indicators for
Local Authorities and Local Authority Partnerships: Handbook of Definitions the
measurement of NI 14 is based solely on the Council’s assessment of whether a
contact made by a customer was avoidable, for example; chasing the delivery of a
service, clarification of a document or e-mail which is badly worded, requesting
information that should be available on the council’s website or ringing the
wrong number because contact points are not clearly advertised.
Gathering the data to determine the required NI 14 result requires the
collation of all contacts made by customers with the council through all
channels and an assessment of how many of these were ‘avoidable’ by the
definitions provided by the NI 14 documentation. This will provide the minimal
information required but does not afford a means of drilling down into the
composition of the result in order to have an informed basis for making
improvements to it, nor does it offer any means of comparing the Council’s
assessment with the view of the customer – an important element of gaining
proper insight into such data.
The GovMetric:NI 14 Module
When implemented across all contact channels, GovMetric already gathers and
reports on the number of contacts made between a council and its customers. So
GovMetric already has access to the data which comprises the first element of
the NI 14 calculation.
In order to capture the Council’s assessment of ‘avoidability’ – the second
element of the NI 14 calculation – the NI 14 module extends the GovMetric
interface to the Council advisor so as to include the ability to record whether
the contact was avoidable or not.
With these two sets of data, calculation of the formal NI 14 result is
straightforward but, more importantly, GovMetric’s reporting suite allows this
data to be analysed by service and channel so as to provide the means to
understand how the result is built up and which channels or services will
benefit most from improvement investment.
Adding value by obtaining the Customer’s view
We have also extended the basic NI 14 measurement capability by asking the
customer for their view on whether the contact was avoidable. This provides the
opportunity to compare the Council’s assessment with the customers and hence
provide yet deeper insight into the truth behind the raw NI 14 result.
Reporting
Reports are available within the GovMetric reporting suite on various aspects of
NI 14 results allowing insight to be gained on how the base result is built up
and offering the opportunity to examine potential return on investment and
measurement of results.
Audit Requirements
GovMetric currently sets data integrity and quality standards for our users in
order to ensure that the results they see, particularly when using the
benchmarking capability, are not misleading as they could be if data quality was
significantly different between councils.
The NI 14 module applies similar data integrity and quality measures to the NI
14 data provided by GovMetric in order to show that the reported NI 14 results
meet required standards. To achieve this, audit criterion will have to be set
and achievement against these criteria will have to be measured and reported on
monthly to allow corrective action to be taken that ensures the overall year
result is valid.