Agenda and draft minutes

Apologies for absence were received from Cllrs Bert Jackson, Ian Jelley, Richard Levell and Keli Watts

 No declarations of interest were received.

RESOLVED that:-

The minutes of the meeting held on 21^st June 2024 be approved as a correct record and signed by the Chair.

The meeting received a presentation provided by David West, Head of Digital and Steven Miller, Website Team Leader for Content and Forms on the subject of future digital customer experience developments within the Council.

The primary focus for the presentation related to the corporate website with an overview provided of current performance and metrics, improvements and developments and future opportunities and considerations.

The meeting noted that the Council had approximately 4 million customer interactions per annum, 3.5 million of these being web sessions, with over 300,000 phone calls to customer services, 125,000 emails and 75,000 in-person visits. The figure for web interactions showed the importance of the Council's website as the first port of call for many customers.

For the first two quarters of 2024/25, the Council had seen 1.9 million web sessions, with 4.9 million views of individual web pages. A significant portion of these were transactions with web-based forms, the Council having a total of 386 forms on the website that could be engaged with. For the same period, a total of 139,000 forms had been completed at a customer satisfaction rating of 4.4/5

In addition to web forms, payments could also be made on the Council website with a total of £23.4 million received from over 132,000 transactions. It was noted by the meeting that payments could also be received from non-core Council sites.

The meeting noted that there were in place automated auditing measures for the website, offering performance details for the length of time the site was operational, speed of the site, accessibility and maintenance. It was heard that figures for data privacy stood at 100%, with the Council having a 99% accessibility rating that placed it within the top 10 councils in the country as of October 2024. Improvements were ongoing to reach 100%. It was further noted that public sector accessibility regulations helped ensure the Council met these accessibility targets to ensure access for all residents and businesses.

The Chair queried the Council website search engine as one element of the Council's digital offer that had always attracted criticism. In response it was noted that work was ongoing in this regard with further details to be provided later in the presentation.

Councillor Dorothy Maxwell queried call wait times for customer services with it being heard that the digital service worked closely with customer services to measure those metrics and constantly reviewed contact channels with a view to directing simple queries to the Council website thereby reducing call numbers to customer service helplines.

A number of key improvement and development activities were detailed to the meeting as follows:

Unifications and development of key digital services

·       One Website

·       One forms package

·       Payment solution integrated with the forms package

·       One Customer Relationship Management System - it was anticipated that Phase 3 of this project would be completed during October with further improvements to be made

·       Development platform - this would offer a space where development and creation of more complex transactions could be undertaken

·       One Intranet  ...  view the full minutes text for item 51.

The Executive Forward Plan for October 2024 to January 2025 was noted.

The forward list of items for the EAP was considered.

There being no further business, the Chair thanked Members and Officers for their attendance and closed the meeting.