The link was broken.
She tried twice, gave up, and rang customer services. Forty-two minutes on hold. A five-minute call. A manual application taken down by a stretched call handler.
Now think about that from inside the council. A frustrated resident who will tell her friends the council can't do anything right online. Forty-seven minutes of staff time burned on something that should have taken three. A page that — almost certainly — hundreds of other residents also tried this month. And worst of all, nobody at the council will ever know it happened.
This is the part that quietly grinds people down across local government. The web team can't fix what they can't see. Customer services absorb the calls. The service manager for school meals gets the angry resident. The councillor for that ward gets the email. The accessibility officer gets the audit risk. The chief executive gets to explain it all at the next leadership meeting.
Nobody set out to make this happen. The website just quietly leaks people, every day, and the cost shows up in five different departments at once.
There is a fix. It is cheap, it takes a few days to set up, and a small group of UK and European councils and public bodies are already using it alongside charities and universities. The whole thing comes down to one question, placed at the bottom of every page on the site: "Did you find what you were looking for?"
Your traffic numbers are lying to you
Most councils still report on their website using traffic. Page views, visitors, bounce rates. These numbers tell you what people did. They don't tell you if it worked.
A page can get 4,000 visits a month and fail every single person. The right form is two clicks deep. The next-step link goes to a 404. The phone number is two years old. The contact email goes to someone who left in 2019.
The dashboard will mark that page as one of the council's most popular. In reality, it is one of the worst and it is generating phone calls, complaint emails and councillor enquiries the council is paying for in five other budgets.
The councils getting ahead of this have stopped reporting page views alone. They've started measuring whether the page actually did its job. And the simplest way to know that is to ask the resident before they leave.
One question. A year's worth of answers.
Page-level feedback isn't a new idea. What is new is how easy it has become to actually do.
The format is the same wherever you find it. At the foot of each page, a small set of buttons asks one question; usually "Was this page useful?" or "Did you find what you were looking for?" Two or three reply options. Anyone who says "no" can leave a short comment. No personal information is collected. No cookies. No popup.
What changes is what the content team gets to read on Monday morning. Heloisa Righetto, Comms and Content Lead at the UK charity ACEVO, added a page-level feedback widget to her organisation's site to answer a basic question her team had been guessing at for years: were users actually finding what they came for?
One of the first answers, in a user's own words, was: "No, there's nothing on this page. This is old."
Heloisa's reaction, on the public record: "Oh my God, I didn't even know this page was still live on the website."
She kept reading the comments. Inside a few weeks her team had stopped debating which pages to update — the users were telling them, page by page, in plain language. "It's real information that you can use to start building your content strategy," she said in ACEVO's published interview. "Now I have a plan for every piece of content that goes on the website."
Her advice to peers in the charity and public sector: "Super useful. So go for it!"
She isn't alone. Hanna Loraine, Content Manager at Uniarts Helsinki, said her team had been guessing for years before they added a feedback button. "With the analytics we used before, we always had to guess a little bit about what was working and what wasn't. Now we don't have to guess. We know what works for the users and what doesn't, because they tell us." And, importantly for any team worried about workload: "It's low effort for them and high gain for us."
Aleksi Salonen, Product Owner at the City of Helsinki, put the difference more bluntly: "Askem gives clear and concrete insights on how to improve our content, and the feedback shows exactly what information users didn't find."
Three reasons every team in the building will be glad you did this
The case for putting feedback on every page lands differently in each part of the council. Here are three points that tend to do the most work, whichever team is reading.
One: fewer complaints reaching the inbox. When a councillor forwards an angry email about the website, the response can go back the same day, with data. Pull up the feedback for that page from the last month, see whether the resident is one of many or one of one, and reply with something better than "we'll look into it." Problems get caught and fixed before they become emails.
Two: fewer calls into customer services. Cost-of-living pressure has pushed more residents than ever onto council websites for benefits, housing and discretionary support. When a page fails them, they ring. Every broken page becomes a call-centre cost — paid for by customer services, then noticed by finance. Asking residents directly, on the page that failed them, is the cheapest way to catch the problem upstream. Arttu Huittinen, Development Manager at HSY (the regional environmental authority for Greater Helsinki), described the operational effect plainly: "Customers pointed out areas that weren't as user-friendly, and this helped both me and our administrators decide what to prioritise next."
Three: better content decisions, with evidence. Steve Nicol, Digital Communications Manager at the UK's Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), summed up the experience of using Askem's feedback alongside accessibility monitoring across his organisation's sites: "The platform is easy to use, provides valuable insights, and has helped us... improve how we monitor user experience across our sites. The reporting tools are also very flexible and easy to set up. The support team has also been excellent throughout our journey."
What changes from day one
The setup is simple. The widget is added to the council website once. Visitors use it anonymously. Open comments are aggregated, summarised by topic, and routed to the team that owns each section. A short report goes out each week to the people responsible for content. A longer one can be pulled together for a leadership review.
What that actually looks like across a normal council week:
- The content team stops debating which page to fix next. The data tells them.
- Customer services stop dealing with the same five website complaints over and over, because the problems get spotted and fixed upstream.
- Service managers can see, page by page, where their service is leaking residents, and where it's working.
- When a councillor forwards an angry email, the response goes back the same day, with data.
- When the chief executive asks how the website is performing at the Monday meeting, somebody has an answer that isn't "lots of visits".
Askem, an EU-hosted feedback tool already in daily use at organisations including the City of Helsinki, DNA, HSY, Uniarts Helsinki and (historically) ACEVO and HCPC, runs the service used in the examples above. It is GDPR-compliant by default. It collects no personal data. All data is hosted in the EU. Most teams can have it live within a few days without help from their IT department. Pricing is published openly and scales by site size, no quote-only enterprise tier.
Marjo-Riitta Mustonen, Digital Concepts Development Lead at DNA, summarised what the steady-state use looks like: "We are using Askem really every day to improve the customer experience."
The point isn't the tool. It is the question. Most council websites have never asked their residents whether the page in front of them is actually working. Once you start asking, the answers come back quickly. And a fair number of them are easy to fix.
For UK councils still reporting on their website by visits alone, the next step is small, cheap, and very overdue.
Find out more about page-level feedback at Askem
