The voice of our customers is extremely important to DVLA. Every day we monitor the calls we get, what complaints have been made and more recently what our customers say on social media. We also analyse the work of our casework areas, where further investigation and contact with the customer is needed.
All this data gives us a great insight into the journey our customers take, what works well for them and what we need to improve. With so much data available, it can sometimes be overwhelming. So we, DVLA’s Customer Insight team, have pulled these strands together into a ‘single view’ to gauge:
- where things have gone wrong for our customers
- what needs effort to fix
- if something could have been avoided if things have gone smoothly
Doing this allows us to see in one place some of the unnecessary demands generated by our products and services, and also more importantly why.
We’ve categorised our contact with customers into three themes; progress chase/delay, information problems and transactional issues.
- This allows us to take action and make decisions to prioritise activities in our continuous improvement programme. We monitor trends regularly, highlight issues and work with service/product managers and operational areas to improve our services for customers
- We’re currently looking at information problems. About two thirds of our telephone calls are from customers asking how to do something. By making our services simpler, better and safer we should be able to reduce these queries by improving information for customers
- Understanding why customers contact us will let us improve not only the quality of information but how they access it. We’re currently working with our external communications team to identify issues and are developing YouTube videos to help customers complete application forms
Where we can evidence something isn’t working for our customers or isn’t working as well as it could be, we aim to get a more rounded picture of what’s going wrong. We film our customers’ experience of making an application or filling in a form. Being able to see how a customer interacts with our services is very powerful. It convinces the relevant business area, within DVLA, that something has to change.
The aim of course is to improve the customer experience for all of our customers.
We’ll keep you updated on developments - look out for my next blog.
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