The Background

Access Croydon is a face to face contact centre for council public services in Croydon, dealing with a massive range of services from general enquiries to council tax queries to more complex services like social housing.  The current centre consists of three major zones organised by service department (such as Council Tax and Benefits), with waiting and consultation taking place within these zones.

The Brief

How can we create a facility for the public that supports a more efficient and effective service experience? How can we shift towards a greater emphasis on self service, yet not alienate those customers that struggle in adopting such technologies? How can Access Croydon be truly customer centred?

Our Process

We took a strategic design approach during this project that aimed to centre the eventual design around the needs of customers, balanced by the strategies of Croydon Council. We did this through a five stage design process:

The Outcomes

Highlights of our design included:

• We identified nine major service experience strategies across the Arrival and Queuing Experience, Waiting Experience and Consultation experience to create a better customer experience, as well as a number of minor strategies.  These strategies were a combination of service changes, operational changes, spatial changes and technological changes, and included other recommendations about information, signage and interior design.

• This included a shift towards a unified customer experience where customers see the council, not a department.  This will be accompanied by a move from a spatial model organised by department to a spatial model organised by activity, with zones for Arrival and Self Service, Waiting, and Consultation.

• The spatial model is designed such that the more time customers spend within the centre and the more complex their service needs are, the deeper they progress into the space.  This frees up capacity in waiting and consultation settings by introducing new service options such as “Document Self Service” for document drop-off and application form submissions, reducing the time taken for this task by 75% and significantly freeing up resources elsewhere.

• We designed a change from department centred waiting areas towards customer-centred waiting areas with increased customer choice, including a General Waiting cafe, a specific Family Waiting Area for parents and children only, a Quiet Waiting with no children allowed, and several more specialised waiting areas for more complex needs.

• We designed a more customer-efficient arrival and queuing system, moving past a one size fits all ticketing model towards a tiered triage approach designed to reduce queuing and waiting times significantly, as well as free up waiting and consultation space.