In a discussion about service delivery yesterday, a colleague urged caution about the promotion of self-service transactions on the grounds that people will be less inhibited about lying to a faceless computer than they would to a contact centre agent (and still less so, presumably, to somebody in a face to face conversation). It’s tempting [...]
This is new – at least in the UK, as far as I know. DVLA are entering people who renew their tax disc online or by phone into a draw to win a car – and moreover a car so efficient that it is not liable to car tax. If I understand it right, they [...]
Having just discovered Directgov’s mobile internet site, I had a look around. Very sensibly they don’t attempt to replicate the range of content on their main site and have tried to focus on a limited set of content that might be particularly useful to people on the move. But in going down that route, Directgov [...]
A curious bit of emergent classification from the Directgov main site about its mobile site. There is a URL you can put in (though not, from my experience, any smart detection which serves the mobile version to a mobile device). But you can also reach it through each provider’s menu structure – and there’s a [...]
Not everyone has access to the internet. But we are well on the way to pretty much everyone having a mobile phone. And in parallel with that, what those phones can be used for is growing almost as fast. A while ago, I predicted that within three to five years, the sophisticated communication features now [...]
The idea that the best kind of government service is no service at all is not a new one. Government is necessarily part of the service economy, but much of it destined never to be part of the experience economy. The best kind of tax return is the one you don’t have to fill in; [...]
Richard Allen had his driving licence stolen. Getting it replaced took a one minute phone call. That’s a disaster.
Ofcom has just published some new research on communication markets across the UK. There’s lots of data, most of it broken down by the UK nations and the English regions. One interesting area is the reducing importance of fixed line telephones. Two years ago, 80% of adults said that they personally use a mobile phone; [...]
This post comes to you from my mobile phone – a boast which is much less impressive now than it would have been a couple of years ago – but then my slim claims to be on the leading edge of technology use evaporated quite a while ago. Does any of that matter? Not at [...]
Once you have got your customers into a self-service channel, it’s quite a good idea to try to keep them there. Sometimes things go wrong, sometimes systems are down, sometimes users do unexpected things. So you need error messages. Ideally ones which tell the user what is wrong, what they need to do to fix [...]