New year — new problems?

What our data tells us about the rise in demand for advice in January

The new year is always one of the busiest times for Citizens Advice. Last month, our local offices saw 187,000 people face-to-face, on the phone and over webchat. There were 10 times that number of visitors to our website — 1.9 million over the course of the month. So why do so many people get in touch once we’ve put New Year’s Day in the rearview?

We’re always busy early in the new year. Our numbers dip in December and rise in January, with another spike in March at the end of the financial year. Some of the explanation for this is pretty obvious — most of our services close between Christmas and New Year, so numbers are bound to be down. But there are fewer visits to our website too. People are just busier in December, thinking about other things.

Some of the increased activity in January is down to advice-seekers who deferred their visit until the Christmas period is out of the way. But when we look more closely at the number of people using our local services, we see a rise of at least 50% month on month in every category of advice — benefits, debt, housing, employment and more. There are simply more people looking for advice.

Cause and effect

Digging into the specifics, we see some issues that are not just deferred — they may have been actually caused by what happened at Christmas.

Comparing January to the average month last year, some of the biggest rises in advice queries were debt and financial capability. Debt and financial capability are two sides of the same coin — a problem and a solution.

Sadly, another big rise, is among people looking for advice on family and relationship problems — an extra 2,400 people in January compared to the average month last year.

The pattern is repeated online. In January, compared to the average month last year, around 11,000 more people visited the website for advice on relationship problems. 18,000 more visitors were looking for debt advice, and 25,000 more visitors were looking for benefits advice. Money is clearly on people’s minds at this time of year.

An interesting outlier is consumer issues — a category of advice that barely saw a fall in online visits in December, meaning a smaller rise in January. Evidently, Christmas generates consumer problems and people turn to our website to help solve them.

These patterns tell us a few things.

1. People’s need for advice is going to vary with their circumstances. We need to be there when people need us. If you’ve maxed out your credit card over Christmas, an in depth face to face session with a debt advisor before the payment is due in January might be the best thing. If the expensive Christmas present you bought for your child has turned up broken, you need to be able to check your consumer rights quickly online before buying a replacement.
2. The same people access our services in different ways or with different problems. The similarities between online and offline patterns are revealing. Undoubtedly, some people will always want face to face and some will only ever want to use a website. But there is obviously an overlap, which suggests that our customers on and offline are the same people, just at different times, or with different problems. We need to make it as easy as possible to move between a self service website and more expert-led face to face advice.
3. Human behaviour is important. After spending money at Christmas, people make New Year’s resolutions to get their finances in order and come to see Citizens Advice. Our data is very consistent on this, so we set ourselves up to deal with it every year. We have loads of amazing data resources — the numbers of clicks on a webpage, the timing of phone calls to our Adviceline, the contents of evidence forms our advisers complete. Our task is to use that data to gain the insights that ensure our service and our advocacy work with the grain of that human behaviour.

It’s fascinating to draw out the insights from the unique data we have — but the point is to use it all to help people better.