The Business Case

Sir David Varney's review into Transformational Government cited one example of where a citizen had to make 44 separate contacts to government departments following the premature death of her husband.

This is an onerous and laborious experience at the best of times, but when having to do this at one of the most emotional times in anybody's life, it's bordering on traumatic.

We know that each contact costs money – face-to-face contact is typically £6 per contact and telephone contact is typically £1.50 per call. So what effect will offering several services with a Single Contact have?  Our experience shows that typically you could expect 10% fewer face-to-face and 50% fewer telephone contacts – in a unitary authority this can equate to close to £1m per annum.

The programme was set up shortly afterwards to investigate how this situation might be resolved.

It is a cross-government programme seeking to deliver a service which means citizens need only to tell us about a change of circumstances once. But at the moment it is at the stage of preparing a business case to articulate what the costs and benefits might be.

The good news is that initial implementation does not need to be complex

Yes, you can make it complicated and based on IT, but our experience shows that with a positive approach you can achieve 90% of the benefits just by getting services across the council to “co-operate” – this is where our facilitation skills can help.

Identify the events

We first identify the key events that will result in multiple contacts with the council – for example, moving in to the borough, new unemployment or death.  Each of these events will typically result in up to a dozen separate approaches to the council. 

Identify the trigger that tells you when to make a single contact offer

We have found that in the examples above, the first contact is not always the obvious one, so that we need to highlight the type of contact that should trigger an offer of Single Contact treatment.

Agree the protocols

The key element of Single Contact success is engaging each of your own service delivery departments and agreeing that your first point of contact may act for each department and under what protocols.  With our extensive experience, we can offer practical suggestions on the shape and form of such protocols and can facilitate their development and adoption. Click here to see the Single Contact Case Study

Get on with it!

We have found that one of the blockers to implementation is the desire to use a pure IT solution to achieve the objectives – our experience is that provided the protocols in place, implementing interim solutions, such as email notification, can start the culture change, gain buy-in and win customer plaudits – whilst saving staff time and cost.