Northern comedian Peter Kay refers to web-based technology as ‘t'Internet'. He also claims, of course, ‘I have seen the future, and it's garlic bread'. In among these two statements, it is possible to discern the future for customer services – and that's going to be technology-based. West Lancashire has just been ranked by SOCITM as having the best district council website in the UK. While we are grateful for this accolade, I should also add that we are rapidly dismantling what we have got and building a new site which will look nothing like anything else in the public sector. The brief to our own staff, and the consultants who are working on the project, was to make it as aesthetically pleasing as the best of the travel industry – eg, www.exclusiveescapes.co.uk – but at the same time, able to handle the complexity required from delivering local government services. We will shortly be unveiling our new website and hope everyone will agree with us that it matches all we set out to achieve. While it is great to be SOCITM's number one – and it's equally flattering to carry off national customer services awards – this isn't why we are putting all this effort in. Quite simply, it's about continuing to drive down costs and drive up quality. We all know that, unlike the private sector, we have to offer customers a choice in terms of access – ‘click/call/come in'. We also know, however, that customers' current preference is for telephone access. Yet, at the same time, we also recognise that web-based transactions cost a fraction of those from the other two channels. So how do we square the circle? One notion would be just give the customer what they want. But, as motor manufacturer Henry Ford once famously put it, ‘If I had given the customer what they wanted, I would have delivered a faster horse'. I believe that a district council's size is no barrier to it having a website which citizens will increasingly want to use. A well-designed and up-to-date website can provide citizens with access 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at a fraction of call centre or walk-in costs. Given that an increasingly-large proportion of the population are happy with using the Internet for a variety of goods and services then encouraging access to a council's websites shouldn't be difficult. Although district councils' relative smallness is no barrier to success, I do believe there are a number of hurdles which need to be overcome. Council leaders and chief executives need to be seized with the opportunities which a fully transactional website can bring, and these are around the issue of cost and quality. Equally, they need to ensure the organisation has a ‘can-do' culture and that services are re-engineered for easy e-delivery. If you doubt, just look at how start-up companies such as easyJet and Ryanair have forced a huge change in the airline industry with the belated launch last year of BA.com. This is an excellent example of relatively-small organisations which have good services and fantastic websites. This combination has ‘knocked spots off' the established giants in that field. There is obviously an analogy here in local government – the smallest district council, if it has the real desire, can create a website and a customer experience that is every bit as good as the largest metropolitan council in the land. n Bill Taylor is chief executive of West Lancashire DC
