Waste and Street Scene
Service Redesign

The Tunbridge Wells Borough Council Digital Team approached Smarter Digital Services to assist in the Discovery phase of their Waste and Street scene service redesign project, looking specifically at two processes: notifying the Council of a missed bin and requesting a new bin.

Situation

The existing processes for both notifying the Council of a Missed Bin and requesting a Replacement Bin have no structured digital approach. Current processes are time consuming, inefficient and can leave the customer feeling under valued and in the dark over how their issue or request is progressing. Moving to a more digital end-to-end process will drive efficiencies across all back office processes and deliver a more customer-focused service.

What we did

‘As is’ user journey mapping

• Early engagement with key stakeholders including Customer Services, Contractors, Waste and Street Scene teams to gain a thorough understanding of end-to-end processes
• Process map the ‘as is’ processes

Plan user research

• Identify the priority user research questions to explore
• Identify major assumptions we need to learn more about
• Recruit the users to interview

Conduct user research

• Carry out interviews to gain the customers perspective of delivery of service
• Capture user feedback and feelings of previous experiences with the Council with these specific processes
• Obtain and compile the top and key user needs
• Find out more about the assumptions made around the process

Analyse research

• Prioritise a list of user needs
• Explore new insights
• Refine our understanding of the service
• Highlight any unanswered questions

New service design workshop (user journey with internal process)

• Stakeholder engagement
• Design the proposed new service, incorporating user research to create the ideal user journey
• Understand what the internal needs of the service are
• Process map the ‘to be’ processes

Map assisted digital and offline user journeys

• Plan how to deliver the service to people who don’t have access, can’t access or choose not to access the internet
• Process map the assisted digital ‘to be’ processes

Define and baseline critical success factors/objectives

• Used to measure whether the project has achieved what it set out to after project completion

Result

The TWBC Digital team are now using everything delivered during the discovery phase to progress in to the Alpha phase of their project. The team are currently developing a prototype digital service and are testing this with both internal and external users.

This Alpha phase will be a period of constant and consistent iteration using the feedback gained from all users.

Partner Feedback

“The SDS team was a pleasure to work with in what was an intense, time-bound and valuable piece of work that we’d been waiting to start for quite some time.”

“We’re now in the Alpha phase of the project where all of SDS’s work is being developed and tested with the service area, contractor, Customer Services and residents.”

“All of SDS’s work was of a high, precise, standard. SDS worked well with the whole project team which included people from across the organisation – Customer Service, Contractors, Service Managers, Head’s of Service, Waste and Street Scene and digital teams.”

“We’re looking forward to working with SDS again in the future and would certainly recommend the team to other organisations looking to take a step forward from a digital and service design perspective.”

Kane Simms
TWBC Digital Services Manager

Info