CROYDON IN CRISIS: It has taken external consultants almost six months to discover that the council’s website is ‘jargon-heavy’, ‘corporate’ and ‘difficult’ to use. Those findings have cost the cash-strapped council at least £1m.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
‘Transformation’: council CEO Katherine Kerswell, addressing the staff webinar last week
After being paid at least £1million of money that Croydon’s cash-strapped council really doesn’t have, and taking nearly six months to get staff and the public to fill in forms and questionnaires, external consultants have come to the conclusion that… Croydon Council’s website is a bit shit.
That was among some “key findings” revealed to staff in a council-wide webinar held last week, the latest effort by Kerswell and her management team to justify the massive spending on consultants ahead of what seems likely to be the next round of cost-cutting.
Katherine Kerswell, the council’s £192,000 chief executive, earlier this year hired management consultants Newton, Impower and Boston Consulting Group to help her make even more cuts to council services – all with the backing of Tory Mayor Jason Perry.
The consultants’ work is supposed to inform what Kerswell calls “Future Croydon”, as she and her “corporate management team” repeat their mantra of “transformation”. Council staff, many of them fearing that their jobs will be next for the redundancy axe, are calling it “No Future Croydon”.
Newton’s contract alone, according to an official council Freedom of Information response, is costing Croydon’s long-suffering Council Tax-payers at least £1million. Impower and Boston’s deals are not expected to be any cheaper.
According to Kerswell, Boston (or BCG) are “a global firm with an expertise in digital innovation in the public and private sectors…”, who the CEO brought into Croydon “to support the council… to develop a new operating model”.
Kerswell had promised that Boston were to take “a forensic look at how we do things…”, in order to “develop new ways of working”.
Kerswell said: “Our partners will offer fresh eyes, additional expertise and can draw on what they have achieved with other organisations.”
And what have Boston found after months of rigorous reviewing of the council’s “operating model”?
About half an hour into the webinar, a bright young thing from Boston announced to his remote audience of Kerswell and around 700 council employees that it “came across loud and clear” that the council website was in need of fixing. Which sort of wins a Golden NSS* award.
The council’s website, Boston had discovered, is “jargon-heavy”, with “bugs” and broken links, which most people find “hard to navigate”. Who’d have thought, eh?
At another point in the presentation, the council’s website was described as “corporate, unintelligible and difficult”.
Boston had spent their expensively acquired time monitoring 750 calls from the public, and discovered that 65% – two-thirds of them – had been made because residents had found that the council website was “confusing” or “unclear”.
What should be really troubling about all this is that this has been “discovered” more than a decade since the council opted for a “digital-first” strategy of dealing with resident inquiries, with Kerswell’s predecessor, Jo Negrini, hiring in a platoon of specialist staff for a special Croydon Digital department.
In the meantime, the council has cut back on the number of staff working in its contact centre or answering phones on its switchboard, all the time making the council, and its services, evermore remote and more difficult to access. It has almost been as if council directors wanted to reduce the demand from the public for its services.
Clickbait: Kerswell’s consultants found Croydon’s website to be “jargon-heavy”, with “bugs” and broken links. They described it as “corporate, unintelligible and difficult”
The council’s approach to public communications has been a shambolic mess for at least 15 years. Online-only only works if the systems offered are slick and smooth. Croydon Council’s website usually demands a user to take at least four clicks to find their way to the required page. It is an object lesson in deliberate deterrents.
Kerswell has presided over all of this for four years.
But she needed million-pound consultants to tell her that this was wrong.
Boston reached their conclusions, according to one of those death-by-PowerPoint slide presentations of which consultants are so fond, under a heading of “Improving customer service”. Ahhh. If only.
The council website, the consultant presenting this section of the webinar said, is “ripe for reimagination and transformation”. The website, he said, ought to be “a massive lever to direct residents upstream”.
And the solution to all this, according to Boston, is… AI!
They want to add a little ChatBot window, using Microsoft CoPilot, to the council’s website. It is a feature familiar to many bank customers, users of supermarket online ordering sites, and to the residents of dozens of other local authorities around the country.
But given that the Croydon bot’s responses are liable to be based on the very same council website which has so many issues, not least being often out of date, some of those on the receiving end of the webinar last week suggested that this might be “frustrating” and “not very helpful” for residents.
“Is AI what residents want?” one staff member asked, not unreasonably.
Kerswell didn’t answer that one. So AI is probably what residents are going to get…
(* – NSS = No Shit Sherlock, in case you didn’t already know.)
Read more: From The Observer: ‘Scandalous’ £3.4bn UK state spending on private consultants last year
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