50000 online council accounts save vital cash for public services

Thursday November 3, 2011

One year ago we launched our radical new website design, including customer accounts for everything from parking permits to council tax statements.

In the first year alone, almost 50,000 people have opened online accounts with us, making a major contribution to our bid to save taxpayers £400,000 through moving to more cost-effective customer channels.

Online services make it easier and quicker to do business with the council, rather than through more costly methods such as phone calls or face-to-face.

"We are asking our residents to do their bit to help us protect vital public services from the national spending squeeze," says Council Leader, Cllr Stephen Greenhalgh. "One of the ways people can help is to use our website to report street problems or pay for a parking permit. Thousands of people are finding it quicker and easier than ever before."

H&F has one of the most advanced council websites in the country, including:

‘My account’ – a single login and authentication process for access to your own account for council tax, housing benefits, parking permit renewals and reporting street problems.

Personalisation – a homepage feature offers individual site visitors suggestions for content they may be interested in, based on the most popular pages viewed by others with a similar site-visit profile.

Residents’ voice – the public can contribute comments on local issues and send in their own local restaurant and arts reviews.

A hyper-local view - an improved ‘find your nearest…’ section with interactive maps, plus localised information when you enter your postcode and local pages for the borough’s three town centres.

A ‘one-place’ site – it offers a portal to the whole borough, not just the council, with links to other public, private and voluntary organisation, a house-buying guide and news about anything and everything that is happening in the borough.

A redesign – making council services more accessible and easy to use, the site’s redesign includes a rotating news banner, easier access to prominent payment and reporting channels, an improved A to Z of services, better integration of externally hosted applications and improved accessibility for people with disabilities.

"Residents increasingly want, and expect, to be able to manage their own accounts online and to be offered content tailored to them," adds Cllr Greenhalgh." Our latest set of developments is good for us and it’s good for our residents. We would like to think that it puts our site at the very forefront of what’s good in council website design."

The development of the site is supported by the council’s IT partner Agilisys, through the H&F Bridge Partnership (HFBP), whose expertise in using technology to transform service delivery to citizens has been invaluable in shaping the council’s web strategy. Commercial advertising and personalisation features have been developed in partnership with LoGonet Ltd.

Agilisys CEO, Kay Andrews said, "We are proud to have helped our long-term partner Hammersmith & Fulham deliver such an innovative website that supports the council in its efficiency and citizen-focused objectives. Many features of the site make it a UK first for local government, and I truly believe we have created something unique in its ability to enhance eChannel migration across multiple council transactions - this takes cost out of the back office and sets a benchmark which many other councils are working to achieve.”

The user account portal includes:

• Cross service validation - e.g. using council tax data to prove residency when applying for a visitor permit
• Resident data self-cleansing - i.e. we are enabling residents to update their own data reducing data cleansing costs out of the back office
• Building the platform for cross-service channel-shift - i.e. using one service to offer a user another service online in a single environment

This is on top of delivering a solution that tackles the following traditional issues that have been hard to resolve in the past:

• Single sign-on across multiple applications
• Integrated presentation and navigation for multiple applications
• True self service with full integration to back office systems
• Enter data once, re-use multiple times (e.g. address)