Liverpool reinvents customer service through digital platform

Liverpool City Council is in the midst of a huge overhaul of its customer experience offerings, aiming to redesign services to reflect residents’ needs and improve their relationship with the local authority.

To do so, the council desperately needed to improve its digital presence, but simply turning a paper-based service into an online one wasn’t going to do it.

Helen Gerrard, the council’s director of customer experience, told Computer Weekly that the services Liverpool is delivering to its residents “need significant improvement”.

“All of the feedback we had from resident surveys show that we’re falling behind other local authorities,” she said, explaining that when residents use private services as a customer, they can track the service from start to finish, it is user friendly and – most importantly – the service can be trusted.

“We have a desire to make sure that we have a trusted relationship with our residents. As public sector, we have a very different relationship than a private sector company, and there are elements of trust that are broken down because people perceive we’re not delivering the basics correctly,” Gerrard said.

“If we’re not delivering the basics, it becomes much harder for us to have that community, public health, preventative role that local authorities now have to step into, because people are not trusting the messages we’re giving out.

“There’s a really broad spectrum of work we need to do to build trust, and a lot of that is influenced by basic service delivery standards, and one of the ways in which we want to improve those standards, is maximising the use of digital, which is how a lot of residents want to access our services.”

To get to grips with the gaps in service delivery, the council went out to procurement and in October 2024 ended up partnering with Jadu and its low-code digital self-service platform, offering seamless integration between the front and back end. The council is also using Jadu’s case management and its MyAccount product.

But it’s not only about slapping "lipstick on a pig". The council is redefining services and the way people access them, changing the focus from individual services to customer needs.

Gerrard said that a lot of services work in silos, either because it’s deliberate or by default because they don’t have access to information from other services.

“The more we can make [data] visible, where it’s relevant and appropriate to do so, there is obviously a benefit to residents, but also to the culture and the service, because we can look at that resident as an individual and understand their relationship with the council, not just that individual service,” she said. 

Darren Gill, director of ICT and digital at the local authority, said that although the council already has a website that is fairly accessible, there is still a lot of work to do around what residents actually need.

“I think a lot of council websites are built around the services the council wants to offer, rather than around what residents need,” he said. The new, enterprise-level digital platform from Jadu is a step in the right direction.”

Together with the website, it will be “the launching pad for online services where people are able to work out where to go for help,” Gill said, adding that for the council it also means they – with the appropriate permissions in place – will be able to have a record of the residents’ interactions with the council, regardless of which service they’re using. “It means they are going to be able to self-service in a way that suits them,” he added.

“We know that a lot of our residents would not only want to deal with us digitally, but expect to be able to. And at the moment, we’re almost compelling people to come and see us or phone us, for no other reason other than that we don’t have the appropriate channels in pace.”

Face-to-face or phone services will still be in place for those who prefer them. The council is also working to tackle digital exclusion, including through a partnership with the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, helping people to gain access to the internet through the provision of devices for people who cannot afford it.

The council also offers digital training at libraries and adult learning centres.