Customer-led transformation

The aim was to help councils exploit these approaches to engage with and understand their customers better and to drive the re-design of local services, making them more targeted and efficient.

Across four phases of the programme, 63 projects were selected against criteria which ensured that they promoted efficiency, enhanced citizen empowerment and addressed a major priority facing local service providers, whether this was reaching particular customer groups such as vulnerable older people or troubled families, or tackling a ‘wicked problem', such as worklessness or community safety.

The projects were led by councils and involved local partners from the public, voluntary and community and private sectors. An explicit condition of funding was that the projects would share their findings and outputs with the wider local government sector, building a repository of knowledge and good practice.

Evaluation of the Customer-led Transformation programme

A key finding from the evaluation is that the programme delivered, or supported the delivery of over £331 million of financial benefit to the public and public services. This includes savings directly from the projects of £65.1 million (comprising direct cashable savings, cost avoidance, targeted benefits uptake and income generation), projected savings (identified but not yet delivered during the project) of £46.2 million and the stimulation of wider transformation programmes totalling £219.7 million of benefits.

The evaluation assessed:

• what the programme achieved
• the impact that greater use of customer insight and social media approaches on councils, their customers and their partners
• the practical ways in which councils can best take advantage of these tools in the future
• the lessons for the sector as a whole, including how these approaches can support emerging priorities such as better demand management, behaviour change and radical service redesign.

The findings from the evaluation highlight that the programme has delivered significant benefits to:

• customers – in terms of more targeted and more accessible services, earlier intervention so problems do not escalate, more integrated and personalised delivery
• councils – in terms of better resource allocation, greater efficiency and reductions in waste, better relationships with customers and new thinking about how services should be designed and delivered
• partnerships – in terms of achieving common goals and eliminating duplication, cutting through organisational and professional silos, developing ‘whole systems' approaches to difficult cross-sector issues and building shared assets and reducing costs.

Case studies

Fifty-five case studies have been produced with the project team to detailing:

• what they set out to address
• the tools and techniques they applied
• how they engaged with the target customer group
• the lessons they learnt
• the initial benefits that resulted.

The complete list of case studies

Managing customer demand

A number of the Customer-led Transformation projects develop a demand management approach. Demand management changes the roles and relationships between service provider and customer.

A critical part of demand management is finding alternative ways of meeting customer needs, which depends on understanding those needs in the first place. Demand management practices often comprise changing the respective roles of provider and customer and the relationship between them, such as by:

• promoting independence
• facilitating peer to peer support
• empowering customers to decide how budgets are spent
• getting the right help to the right people at the right time, thereby avoiding unnecessary or duplicate demands
• changing customer behaviours to reduce or avoid demand
• intervening early to avoid more costly demand arising later
• re-abling customers, by providing support to people to help them recover or recuperate and regain their independence.

Download 'Managing customer demand' – an LGA publication, published 4 July 2013