Our service design principles

Complimenting our cross-cutting principles are the principles that lie behind our approach to designing services. We will:

  • provide a consistent customer experience within and across all points of customer contact
  • build in effective use of social media
  • be innovative – how can smart technology improve the customer experience – for example use of voice-activated control, remote sensors and so on
  • focus on improving the outcome and how technology can help that – for example using remote monitoring to enable frail elderly people to live in their homes for longer
  • make it easy for customers through the smart use of reminders, confirmation and other notifications where relevant – this will also help reduce avoidable calls or missed appointments
  • offer a choice of communication – SMS text messaging or email for the customer to opt in to
  • enable the tracking of progress via notifications at key milestones
  • use adaptive or smart forms (where the next question asked may be varied according to information provided in preceding questions)
  • provide a customer account and secure single sign-on – customers to be able to interact with and fulfil their service needs with any of the council’s services through one website and account
  • ensure that changes in personal details are notified to us once and applied to all council services
  • design for the lowest confidence customer
  • ensure no one is left behind – building in effective digital inclusion and assistance measures
  • learn from the data – trends, behavioural insights, predictive analysis
  • measure performance and continuously improve