A platform that will take us to destination success

All this month we are celebrating five years of Dorset Council signing the Local Digital Declaration.

The Declaration is a shared ambition for the future of local public services.

It was written in 2018 by a collective of 45 local authorities, sector bodies and government departments – including Dorset Council – and outlines our goals and commitments. Since then, a further 300 local authorities have signed up.

In a series of blogs, we’ll be sharing how we are meeting the aims of the Declaration – and in this article we highlight how a new customer platform will improve our offer to customers.

When Dorset Council was formed in 2019, we pledged to put customers at the heart of all our services and help make the county a great place to live, work and visit.

And digital is key to becoming more responsive to our customer needs.

For the past three years we have been building the foundation of our customer platform to:

• improve the experience of customers using our services.
• rationalise the number of software applications used across the council.
• make better use of data and emerging technology, so we can become more proactive in how we deliver our services.

The platform isn’t just one technology.  It’s how we will join up the technologies we use and the data we hold about our customers to provide consistent experiences.  It will enable us to reuse common capabilities across the whole organisation changing how we use software applications.

So how will this benefit customers?

On average, a customer’s record can be found on at least four different council systems – resulting in duplication and potentially out-of-date information.

For our customers this can be frustrating having to repeat the same information multiple times to the same organisation.

It can also make it more difficult for them to be kept up to date with the progress of an enquiry and any new information such as change of address, might not be shared across services.

Rethinking how we deliver services and designing them for our platform approach will give people more choice on how we communicate with them, provide proactive notifications on live enquiries, and reduce the number of passwords and portals people use to deal with the council.

The customer platform will make our services simple, easy to use and available to everyone. This will help free up more resources to support our most vulnerable residents and those unable to get online.

It will enable us to build services faster over time and give us flexibility to adapt quickly to ever-changing demand.

What’s happened with the customer platform so far?

So far, we’ve:

• moved the Dorset Council, Public Health, and Adult Social Care websites onto the platform.
• we now publish the councillor register of interest details onto the website, moving from a manual to a digital process.
• created a website to support the foster care recruitment campaign.
• created a new tool for web docs on the website to reduce the number of PDFs.
• soft launched the first version of an online customer account – which already had over 1,000 users register.

What’s next?

As with all digital projects, work doesn’t stop once something is ‘live’. We are continuing to develop the above, listening to feedback to understand how we can improve, and ensure that the platform continues to meet our customers’ needs.

Over the coming months we will:

• extend the use of the online customer account into services.
• create a new newsroom for all external Dorset Council news and blogs.
• explore new ways to present maps for elections on the website.
• extract data to provide insight on how services are performing.
• Move the Weymouth Crematorium web presence onto the platform.
• create a new digital family offer for Children’s Services.
• work with our supplier as part of a Local Digital Fund project to develop e-commerce capabilities on the platform for areas such as commercial waste and traded services to use.

Look out for future customer platform updates here on the Digital Dorset blogsite.