Creating a hub of digital services to better serve the public and reduce demand.
Since 2013, WAE has worked with the Metropolitan Police (the Met) to develop and implement a customer-centred strategy, answering both the needs of the police and the public in the 21st century. Their vision continues to focus on addressing the universal public need for a digital channel as helpful, personal and reassuring as approaching an officer on the street.
Since April 2016, WAE has worked closely with the Met and their technical partners to build the foundation for change, starting with a digital platform that provides new online services and a complete overhaul of the Met's current content, to help them better educate and reassure the public.
Critical to success was transforming the organisation in parallel. You can't bring offline services, online, without addressing how this new system will work within the remit of officers' and staff's day-to-day activities. WAE's team were fully embedded within the Met, ingraining a more agile and customer-centric way of working - even training 1200 officers.
The team quickly learned that people come to the Met website primarily to carry out a task. The design and content strategy was centred around this insight and directs members of the public to the service they're looking for as quickly as possible.
Using interactive triage tools and online forms (see above and below), the site is always action-orientated, quickly and simply narrowing down the options down to get to the specific advice or form most relevant to the individual.
Making the public self-sufficient and offering new online reporting options for crime and road traffic incidents, has helped the Met reduce the volume of people that would have called for information, freeing up staff time to be used in new ways.
Signs of channel shift have been clear since the beta launch. The volumes of online reports already form a significant part of the overall demand compared to the phone or paper forms and we can also see a reduction in calls regarding topics where the website provides new online service.
Another crucial part of the Met's website was its advice pages. Early in the project, the team developed a clearer, friendlier tone of voice that would make the content more appealing and accessible to the general public. Stripping out any extraneous visual clutter, they made the information the focus.
Templates agreed, the team then set about liaising with subject matter experts across the Met, from events licensing to child protection, to find the best and most sensitive ways of communicating their particular field. This was no small task.
The 'Careers' section of the site uses bespoke CMS components to allow the Met to make regular updates and help users to navigate large amounts of information quickly.
Prospective Met employees and volunteers should soon be able to learn all about the roles available and apply for a role directly through the website.
'Your area' is a section of the website where users can find up-to-date, interactive crime stats on their ‘ward’ (the area covered by their local police team), including the top three crimes and tailored advice on how to stay safe (see below).
As the Met's digital front counter, the website is constantly improving. Throughout the project, the team's work was highly iterative, co-creating and testing with users at every stage.
The launch of beta in October 2016 allowed the team to continue this testing on a much larger scale, using analytics, business metrics and user feedback to continue to make improvements.
Now, several months in and without any external advertising of the new digital services, the Met is seeing significant impact on quality and speed of the reporting. This is just the beginning for providing a better service for the public, reducing demand on the Met and keeping London safe - the future for digital has just begun.
