Engage

The Local Authority must do more than serve its customers, the citizens and businesses of the Connected Community.  

To stay relevant, it must engage with them and encourage them to engage with each other.  By encouraging and facilitating involvement, not only will the perception of the Local Authority among the citizens change, but the Local Authority will get the considerable benefit of the effort of its citizens to improve services and solve problems. This entails encouraging citizens and staff to organise themselves into groups that discuss and actually do things. The Local Authority will have to have policies and procedures in place to manage this engagement activity.

Represent

The Local Authority’s digital channels should give citizens access to the democratic process. These mechanisms should be designed to make councillors more effective – and protect representatives from being overwhelmed. Many citizens will feel that their channel to change things at the Local Authority will be through their elected members and in many cases, this is entirely appropriate. However, this may be a symptom of other means of feedback and change being unavailable.

Institutional voice

Defining the language, tone and manner that staff should use in written online communications with customers.

A council must be authoritative yet approachable, regulatory yet flexible, definitive yet collaborative.  These conflicts in how council staff communicate with staff are likely to be resolved by having more than one tone in their written and spoken communications.

At least the following three ‘institutional voices’ should be developed and defined:

• personal and personable
• authoritative
• official

Service enquiries must be differentiated from other involvement

Communication channels should distinguish clearly between service enquiries and other forms of feedback. User commenting on content and suggestions for information are very different to specific customer service requests. This is especially true for individuals with a currently open or recently concluded transaction who may be in contact about their case or the service as a whole. The system needs to ensure that separation and privacy is maintained while retaining the efficiency of online communications.

Services must be completed

It must be clear and obvious to a citizen when the service has been delivered and what the outcome was. Users should be allowed to pick their preferred notification channel be it telephone call, email, SMS, etcetera. The website should interface with CRM systems to help service staff see where each case is in the feedback loop.

For services that have a long cycle to completion without current built in feedback points, the user should be able to set a heartbeat feedback time so they are assured that their process is still ongoing.

Connect customer channels and platforms

All interactions with the Local Authority should be joined up. So that no matter how individual strands have been facilitated conversations started via one channel can be continued or added to on any other.

This means some form of CRM software that is used for or interfaced with by all channels needs to be part of the digital strategy.

For some channels this means staffs training for others such as Internet TV, SMS it needs to be a requirement as part of the procurement process.

Inter-language connection

Language differences are a barrier to connecting people and information.  Providing the following facilities for language translation will improve the cohesion across Local Authority services.

• Commercial translation services.
• Automated free translation tools.
• User community provided translations.
• Live chat (audio, video and text) transcription and translation services.

Online surgeries

Elected members should have tools to run structured and managed surgeries. These surgery facilities must be simple enough for the elected member to manage and for citizens to use without training.

The facility should allow for pre-booking of surgery slots, set citizen expectations and ground rules, manage the queue and allow the conversation to happen via instant message, voice or video connection.

Formal petitions

There needs to be formal mechanisms for promoting issues that have significant public support. There will need to be systems in place to move popular motions through the system, from discussion point to poll, from poll to petition and petitions with enough signatures into the formal business of the council.

The early steps on the pathway can be driven by the community with moderation, while the final steps will be subject to specific policies.

Access to Councillors

Elected officials need help to avoid being overwhelmed with people wishing to raise issues.

As the barriers to communication appear to be reducing and citizens’ demands for accountability increase as they seek information or lobby for a cause.

It is essential that Councillors are provided with appropriate tools that allow them to manage their interactions with citizens in ways that suit their schedules and capabilities.  These tools should take into account that Councillors have large constituencies and a high work load that they may need to carry out online in between other tasks or use assistants to filter, redirect and manage online contact.