To take the next step on digital, we dropped the word ‘digital’

Our clients need an even better service, so we’re going beyond digital to try something new

Last year, Citizens Advice helped over 2.6 million people directly and our digital advice had 41 million hits.

The people that turn to us need help overcoming an obstacle in their lives — from debt to evictions to trouble at work — so it’s vital we support them in the quickest, easiest, and most effective way.

A few years ago, to do this better, we invested significantly in digital advice. More and more people were coming to us online to find the help they needed, and our online advice wasn’t up to scratch.

To fix this, we built a fantastic digital team led by a brilliant CDO, staffed with world class professionals — user researchers, UX designers, digital strategists, content designers, data scientists — to reimagine what online advice could be.

We embraced new approaches that had emerged from the technology sector, and been picked up in government in the early days of the Government Digital Service — an approach that was fairly rare among charities at the time.

This meant focusing obsessively on user needs, working hard to understand the language people use to describe their problems, and rewriting our advice into the words people use.

It meant using technology like eye-tracking software to see how people read and navigate advice online. And it meant following people through the problem they faced, looking at it from their perspective. We went from ‘bailiff law’ to ‘Stopping bailiffs at your door’.

The way we organised our work changed too. Our new content was written in an agile and iterative way, testing and learning as we went. We used data to guide every step, adding simple feedback buttons to every page: ‘Did this advice help?’.

In this way, we learned to write clearly while retaining the accuracy that is essential to good advice. We also got better at writing content for our own advisers, adding the extra context and legal terminology that advisers need to help someone find a way forward.

As we got more confident using digital methods, we broadened our approach. We decided to scrap our old Case Management System and build our own, ending a contract with an expensive, old-school IT contractor, and bringing our tech in-house. Our new system, Casebook, was co-designed hand-in-hand with our frontline advisers.

(For those who care, we also changed our tech stack at the same time, ditching physical servers for AWS, escaping Microsoft Office for the more collaborative (and free) G-Suite, adopting Ruby-on-Rails, and building a developer environment that talented people wanted to work with.)

A new chapter: Beyond digital

Last November, our CDO decided to move on to a new opportunity elsewhere — and this presented us with a choice: should we continue the same successful approach, or should we recruit to a new and different role?

After lots of thought, we decided on the latter. To complement this, we advertised not for a CDO, but for an explicitly broader role: Director of Customer Journey.

I’m delighted to say we hired the brilliant Rebecca Kemp, who started in the new role earlier this month.

So how will our new approach be different? It’s early days, but I can see four main ways in which our work is evolving.

1. We’re going beyond ‘digital’. Although digital technologies are a powerful way to change a service, what really matters is the method with which change is done: user research, UX design, agile working, co-design, and solving problems in experimental ways. We now want to apply those methods to a wider set of problems, not all involving digital tech. What this work has in common is a mindset: we’ll always approach questions from a client’s eye view — by starting with, and then working hard to improve, the customer journey.
2. Digital is not a channel. When we started our digital journey several years ago, our website was so poor that we had to focus there. Over time, this led to a misperception — that ‘digital’ refers to online advice. This then led to a worse misperception— that investing in digital meant not investing in face-to-face services, or that it implied nothing more than ‘channel’ shift away from face to face. When we built Casebook, we realised how untrue this is. You don’t invest in digital as an alternative to face to face, you invest in digital as a way to make all advice — face to face, phone, web — better. We’re now mainstreaming that approach.
3. In fact, RIP channels. More than this, it’s now clear that the very idea of ‘channels’ is becoming outdated. For one thing, our data shows us that people want a single, integrated experience, moving seamlessly between channels like web chat or phone. For another thing, from Whatsapp to Snapchat, channels are proliferating. As a result, the channels people use to access services (‘face to face’, ‘phone’, ‘website’) are going the same way that TV channels have gone. 25 years ago, Britain had four TV channels. 10 years ago, there were hundreds. Now, with services from Netflix to Amazon Prime, the very idea of a TV Channel makes less sense — there’s just content, served up wherever, however, and whenever you want. The same thing is starting to happen with access channels for advice.
4. Multi-disciplinary teams. Lastly, we’ve begun to appreciate the full importance of multi-disciplinary working. Of course, this was always a feature of our work on digital. We would solve for the user need, whether that meant designing better content or developing a new tool. Now, though, we’re going further, and broadening the disciplines we include in this work. We’ll still have developers, UX/interaction designers, user researchers, and content designers. But sometimes the answer to an advice problem will be a low-tech change to operational delivery, or an innovation in service design. Often, it will require the experience of our frontline advisers. So we’ll invite people from across the business, including from our local services, to participate in this way of solving problems.

Of course, we won’t do all this overnight. The new approach will take time to develop and we’ll learn lots along the way. To get it right, we’ll need the full expertise of our local network, from the Chief Execs who run our local services, to our frontline advisers. We’ll also need the experience of many teams across the organisation, from operational delivery to business development to technology.

In time, though, we do think this will be an exciting new chapter in our work. It’s an approach that starts with one question: how can we make the experience of using Citizens Advice as seamless, easy, and effective as possible?

If that’s something you want to be part of, drop us a line and we’ll keep you updated on job opportunities: customer.journey@citizensadvice.org.uk

James Plunkett is Executive Director at Citizens Advice, one of the UK’s largest non-profits. His book, End State: 9 ways society is broken — and how we can fix it is out now.