1. Customer Service Timeline
A single view of the citizen
Whilst our designs have always had a focus on providing a single view of a council with citizens serving themselves, we recognise that you do still get phone calls and want to get an overview of what a customer is doing on their account.
We have added the first version of a new function called 'Timeline', which will a council staff member to see at a glance the things that users are doing on their account. Right now this timeline will show when:
- An account was created
- A call / face to face contact was started and the location it took place at
- A call / face to face contact was ended
- A form is submitted and which type it was
- A note was added in customer service notes.
- A user changed their name, date of birth or change of address in their profile
- A user connected Facebook to their account*
* Facebook connection is coming soon - it has not made it into this release but will be available shortly.
This means a user can get a lot of information about an account in a single view as shown below where even with very few interactions it is clear what's happened and the benefit of this view:
A user has the ability to filter for specific types too which will be relevant when there's lots of history.
It is our intention, in the next version of this to add more to what is logged in here I.e.
- Uploaded evidence to a process
- Logged in/out
- Opted in/out of notifications
- Linked/unlinked their account to an authenticated back office i.e. council tax
- Viewed a document within their account
2. Your Area - Community Directory
Your Area
Your Area has been designed with one key focus in mind: Prevention.
Prevention of duplicate/triplicate requests and prevention of long term issues getting worse and resulting in more costly social care/health service provision being required.
This is being done by two functions initially.
1. Your Area - Service Directory
More details on the service directory are below but fundamentally the prevention element here is that users are able to easily find services on their doorstep that could be provided by local charities, voluntary organisations and also council / NHS commissioned services. As a consequence someone with an alcohol problem might get help they need before they become homeless. Or someone find out about a community club to make friends so they are not going to their GP simply as they're lonely.
2. Your Area - Issues
This is covered in the next tab but with this element of Your Area a user can easily see issues that the council has already been told about and thus not report an issue the council already knows about.
Community Directory
Service Directories are collections of services that provide support and things to do at all different scales. Typically the scale of these is that they are council-wide. I.e. if I needed money advice services it would contain those organisations (service providers) within the council boundaries.
However, some service directories are on a much smaller community-scale and others at macro/county/countrywide scale e.g. NHS services. Two years ago IEG4 built an API, place-based and open standards-driven Service Directory that was capable of managing multiple service directories in one place and also capable of being updated directly by service providers.
The beauty of this functionality being designed to be driven by APIs has meant that we have been able to make it seamlessly integrated into the user experience. So within Your Area, this appears as follows:
When a person accesses the Community Directory they will see the following:
However, to be more accurate, the user will see different areas dependant upon the different service directories you choose to link to this. I.e the above three options of Help at home, Things to do and Health and wellbeing are examples of directory names. The All Services allows a user to search across all of them.
If a user clicks on one of these it will then show a preset link of options. These can be changed but for performance and scale we are trying to keep these consistent:
If I were interested in getting some help with meals I click on that and instantly it then searches across the Help at home directory of services within 5km of the person's address:
We can see two results have been found. If one then clicks on one a pop up appears with some detail:
And below the map there are there same details and the ability to drill in to see more details or 'Add it to their bookmarks'. Kind of like setting it as a favourite.
If they click on 'Details' they will see three tabs containing:
- What the service does
- Contact details
- How to get there
This functionality does of course also work in Customer Service Vu so you could for example guide someone on how to get to a service or which bus to catch, which all worked out automatically using Bing Maps route-finding services:
Equally, this will work really well with OneVu's 'Family and Friends' feature which allows a carer/loved one/guardian or friend to be granted access to a person's OneVu account. This would allow them to find services and add the bookmarks to provide details on how to get to sessions etc.
More to come
The linking of service directories to provide the above functionality is first stage in our strategy. Soon to be added to the above will be - for each service:
- Session information i.e. times to come
- Pricing information i.e. Free and cost if not
- Subscribe i.e. where a service is chargeable
We will also be adding assessments which allow a person to tell the council something about themselves in specific areas. I.e. health and wellbeing, loneliness, housing/homelessness, managing money etc. And based upon the outcome of those assessments automatically personalise the services suggested.
This is about bringing social care into the digital mainstream. In the same place you can find your bin day or pay your council tax you can find services to help manage your money or help your parent access useful services.
Other Information
To use Your Area - Community Directory you will require to own the Service Directory function. Please speak to your account manager about this if you'd like to know more.
3. Your Area - Issues
Preventing duplication and maximising engagement
As a part of our strategy of enabling users with eDesigner, OpenProcess and OneVu to do amazing things without code, we are adding a new feature in Your Area called 'Issues'.
Essentially, 'Your Area - Issues' will dynamically update to:
- Change what issues can be searched for
- Show any outstanding processes
Where those processes, within OpenProcess (v1.10 or later) have a 'Geotag' present within the process setup. I.e. where a Geotag is present and thus the geolocation of something has been recorded as a part of it these process types are able to be shown.
For example in the following screenshot we can see there are three purple dots:
We can also see in the filters we are looking at:
- Fly tipping reports
- Reported within the last 14 days
- Within 5 kilometres of
- The person's house
So the first thing to note is the option of Fly Tipping did not exist 5 minutes before this screenshot was taken.
However, once a Geotag was added to this process type:
And some processes were created:
The filter instantly updated to have Fly tipping as an option and displayed the location of known outstanding issues.
The beauty of this is it means that new options can be added in seconds from OpenProcess.
Also eDesigner is about to be upgraded so that when a location is mapped in a form and it kicks off a process it will automatically without any code set the location in OpenProcess as you can see above.
When this is done it essentially means that a council can have a dashboard of any known issues showing to customers within OneVu of any number of incident types without needing assistance from IEG4.
Last the built in map features mean that things like Streetside view mean the person can be sure they're in the same area as the issue already known about or not:
Helping to solve registration issues
There is already a built-in function within OneVu to provide some diagnostics of what happened during the registration process when:
a) A user is part of a group that has the Service Diagnostics permission
b) The user is doing the authentication in Customer Services Vu
In this release we're going further.
Within the Management area of OneVu, there is a new 'Diagnostics' function as shown below.
Basically, a log is now kept of the transactions for each account and thus it is possible to easily see which XMLs have been sent, which URLs were involved, what was returned etc. A log is kept each time something is attempted for every department where this is relevant. I.e. in the example below Capita Benefits and Capita Landlords are shown.
In order to view the log for a customer the email address for the customer simply needs to be placed in the box in the top left when the screen is opened.
If one clicks on a row it will show the detail of the requests made, the responses, the time taken for the back office to provide the responses.
Having access to this functionality requires you to be able to access the management area (obviously).
5. eNotification Tweeks
Little things
In this release, we have modified some elements to make for a more intuitive, user-controlled experience.
a) Removal of an unnecessary option
Previously there was an option that said:
Would you like to receive this notification type? If this was Yes the user would then click Email/SMS/Facebook as being their preferred choice of contact.
Having two boxes was unnecessary. Now the user either chooses to opt-in to receive through an electronic channel or not.
b) Enabling a default opt in / out
Now it is possible per notification type to set it to either default to have opted into email or not. I.e. in the screenshot below the person will need to select their preferred mechanism, a default will not be set as the checkbox beside 'Preference Default Answer' is not checked: