NI 14 guidance

• Smarter Government initiative
• NI14: Reducing avoidable contact
• Next steps
• Presentation and staff quiz

Smarter Government initiative

As part of the Smarter Government initiative, 18 national indicators (NIs) have been removed from the national indicator set (NIS), and NI14 is one of these. However, NI14 data collection will continue to be collected and recorded up to April 2010 – that is, 2009/10 data.

The removal of these indicators is not a signal about the importance of certain policies or programmes. They have been targeted as being those indicators where measurement at the local level has been problematic. In addition, it has been felt the indicator did not add value for national performance monitoring through the NIS.

However, the underlying business issue to reduce avoidable contact has not gone away, only the NI. Arguably the removal of NI14 raises the stakes for the front office who deal directly with the citizen and often their complaints. Following the removal of this NI, making the case for analysing customer contact is now all the more important. Moreover, local authorities have created significant know-how on measuring and reducing avoidable contact and it is therefore important that we capture and share this learning.

Hence, the IDeA and electronic service delivery (ESD) toolkit are keen to hear about the experience local authorities are having measuring and using avoidable contact data, with a view to sharing the know-how and knowledge created more widely with the sector.

Further information

Smarter Government paper – on the Department for Communities and Local Government website

For further details or discussions can be found on  the NI14 Community of Practice (CoP). 

To join a community you must first register on the CoP website – it only takes a few minutes. Then use the search facility or the list of communities to find and join your preferred communities of interest.

NI14: Reducing avoidable contact

NI14 was one of the 198 indicators against which local government was assessed within the new performance management framework.

This indicator aimed to reduce ‘avoidable contact’ between the citizen and their local authority. Examples of avoidable contact include:

• calls from citizens to chase progress on previous service requests
• contact resulting from the citizen not being able to find the information they need on the council’s website.

Such contact is usually of little value to either the citizen or the local authority. However, it is often a significant proportion of overall contact volumes (estimated to be typically 40 per cent of all calls to contact centres). Therefore the cost of handling these calls is significant.

Communities and Local Government, the Cabinet Office, the IDeA, and a group of councils worked together to develop and pilot this indicator. They produced a guide to assist local authorities to apply this to services. Many of the lessons and insights remain relevant in spite of the withdrawal of the measure as a National Indicator.

Reducing Avoidable Contact report (PDF, 66 pages, 4.9MB large file)

Next steps

NI14 may have been withdrawn as a national indicator but the underlying issue remains. Therefore the IDeA and ESD toolkit are working together with a number of local authorities to identify the good practice developed from work on NI14 to understand, capture and then reduce avoidable contact. We are aiming to highlight these stories to share this learning and know-how with the wider sector.

We are interested in your feedback on the lessons you have learned from NI14 and the next steps for improving the customer experience while delivering efficiencies. Your feedback so far indicates continuing interest in avoidable contact, and has highlighted the following:

• The underlying business issue has not gone away.
• Having avoidable contact as a National Indicator helped the front office to get the back office thinking and talking about the customer’s experience.
• Now there is no mandatory requirement, making the case for analysing the reasons for customer contact is all the more important.
• Contact from the customer is a useful, readily available and cost effective source of customer insight, which is relatively straightforward to collect.

Avoidable contact survey

As part of a project to capture this learning, we would be grateful if you would complete the following survey if you have not already done so:

Avoidable contact survey – on the Surveymonkey website

The findings and lessons learned will be shared through the NI14 Community of Practice (CoP) during May:

NI14 CoP (registration required)

Presentation and staff quiz

Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council has produced a presentation and quiz for staff on NI14 which may help you in your council.

Dudley presentation and staff quiz (PDF, 20 pages, 118KB)

The presentation includes speaker's notes. To access them, click on the red 'speech bubble' in the top left hand corner.

Page updated May 2010.