Following feedback from our customers, the following enhancements have been made and will be released to customers after the Easter Break.
Create an account without an email address
Citizen accounts fundamentally revolve around the citizen having an email address in order to be able login/be notified of things. However, there are use cases in Customer Services where the customer will say they will never have an email address / phone number.
Therefore to cater for this, we are introducing a new function, which will allow new accounts to be created without an email address. The following illustrates the new function that is available to cater for this:
This function replaces the 'Register citizen' option that was previously present when doing a search. If you try and register someone it will check anyway to see if they already exist.
To ensure that duplications are prevented there is dedicated functionality that will check whether 2 of the following match:
- Postcode
- Surname
- Date of Birth
So at the point of creating an account without an email, it will check if there's a match on these details. I.e. if one creates an account with
-
BS5 8DD
-
McMahon
-
09/07/1980
And an account already exists with :
-
BS1 2EU
-
McMahon
-
09/07/1980
OneVu will see that two of the three things are still the same and the odds are this is the same person but they've moved address. So it would be better to link to this record than create a new account. The following illustrates this where the account being created was with:
- James McEvoy
- 01/01/1980
- BS5 8DD
In that case two results were found. One where the surname and date of birth matched and one where the date of birth and post code matched:
The user can then choose to use one of these or choose to create the account irrespective.
Advanced search function in Customer Service view
The current search simply allows one to search by Surname.
The new search option makes it such that it is possible to also search by additional fields as shown below:
- Email Address
- Date of Birth
- Post Code
To accommodate for this and the new ability to register someone without an email address the existing search function. Also when a user enters in an additional search criterion, the box will go green to illustrate that it is being used in the search.
New Profile option
The ability for customer service users and citizens to:
a) Change a person's name
b) Change a person's email address
On top of the ability to change their address. These options necessitate a new function called Profile. The following illustrates this:
Additional Functionality for FAQs
Recently we've made two significant changes that enable:
a) Multiple rows to be shown in an FAQs answer. For example:
- A list of the last 5 benefit payments
- A statement of all payments for council tax
- A list of the bills/notifications issued in the past year
b) The ability to dynamically change the content within an answer. What this means is that it is possible to dynamically change an answer based upon the content provided from the back office. So if the back office returns a value of type x show a specific piece of text. But if a value of type y is provided show a different piece of text.
E.g. Is there a discount on my account:
If Discount Type = STUDENT show some text related to student discounts
If Discount Type = SMI show some text related to SMI
Previously this would have required two questions with different visibility.
Additional Elements to pull through for the Civica Benefits
We have recently enhanced the integration to Civica Benefits so that the following information can also be used in FAQs:
Housing Benefit Related Breakdown
- Eligible Rent
- Maximum Rent for Benefit purposes
- Non Dep Deduction Amount HB
- Rent Amount minus the Non Dep Deduction
- Total Income
- Income Disregard Amount
- Net Income
- Applicable Amount
- Excess Income
- Income Types
- Non Dep Deduction Breakdown by person HB
LCTS Related Breakdown
- Total Council Tax Support amount
- Eligible Liability
- Weekly LCTS amount
- Weekly 2nd Adult Rebate amount
- Total Income
- Non Dep Deduction Amount LCTS
- Applicable Amount
- Non Dep Deduction Breakdown by person LCTS
Optimisations on address search
Previously, on creation of an account, when an address was searched for it would slide in results as the user typed but if they accidentally clicked away, the results would slide out of view.
Some sites raised that on touch screen devices this was more likely to cause a UX problem. To mitigate this we've now made it such that as the user types their address it will show a button on the right which will dynamically reflect that it is searching with a loading view:
Once the results are loaded they persist irrespective of clicking around but can close the results by clicking on the upward facing chevron: