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Our initiative is ‘self serve’ electronic kiosk devices where customers can conduct council business electronically and without having to queue to see a customer service advisor in their local community. Our performance and development as a local authority are measured by Key Performance Indicators(KPI’s) One of our service indicators we have is a target to reduce waiting times in our community shops to 6 minutes or under for all council customers. Through the on-set of setting up the 21 kiosks across the city, customers are now able to perform their council and partner servcice enquiries through the kiosk Another of our targets is to increase the rich, richness & access for all our customers through the kiosk. Annual usage figures for the kiosk currently stands at 2.8million across all sites which has thus had a knock on affect of reducing customer waiting times across our Community One Stop Shops where customers come in to make their enquiries. Since the kiosks were established customer waiting times have been reduced by 32% to 3.6 minutes, well within our 6 minute target. This has resulted not only in customer waiting times being reduced but also through better educating customers to perform tasks through the kiosks as they would do online, making services more cost effective and in doing so achieving best value. The kiosks offer great accessibility to customers, providing a free text, email, picture & video mail facility as welll as free internt access. Liverpool City Council are among the first councils in the country to initiate touch screen kiosk technology as a means of communicating with their local authority. Our activity finder function of the tourism apsect of the kiosk is especially innovative. It enables customers who are accessing a kiosk to find the nearest five tourist attrractions to their current location. We also have this function for customers looking for information on their desired local council service. For instance, through inputting your address, you can access council information including the location of your nearest library, leisure centre, and the date you have your bins collected. We have a reporting mechanism set up which enables us to measure the volumes of customers who are accessing the kiosk. The annual usage for our kiosk varies with location, ranging from 305,940 at our busiest site to 52,726 in our least used pod. The average usage per kiosk site is 148,393. These numbers are testament to the continuing popularity and public awareness of the kiosks and while we are not a profit making organisation, the return on our investment can best be shown by the volumes of customers now being educated in using self serve information technology and through a reduction in waiting times across our community One Stop Shop outlets. Re-educating customers in using the technology was perhaps our greatest barrier with the programme as in the early stages of the pilot rollout our customer questionairre highlighted a certain degree of specticism from the general public as to the validitity of such a project. This forced us to re-analyse how we were going to get the message across to customers that the kiosk not only offered a technological solution to their queries but that it heralded a new era in the way customers conduct their council business. We thus resolved to be proactive in the way we got our message across to our customers. Through improved marketing of the kiosks through a poster campaign and through the local press, heeding comments and suggestions made by them in the consultation exercise, combined with our staff in the community shops ‘floor walking’ and providing demonstrations to customers, we were able to allay fears raised and to convince customers of the kiosks’ benefits. NIC DAVIES
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