Why Smarter Services?
LIKE’s Smarter Services work focused on developing new ways of working with citizens and service users to use data and information to complement efforts to co-design better services.
Three approaches creating Smarter Services
- Data and Smarter Services Data is the lynchpin that stitches the customer journey together – it’s often the only signal we receive from service users. We must learn to learn from these signals, in order to understand a user’s emotional and functional needs. At the same time, we need to transform this data into meaningful insights that we can use to understand service use and forecast service demand. This data and information should be used to construct and seamlessly deliver services across a range of channels. Only then will we arrive at a truly multi-channel experience, with the consumer at the centre.
- Local Services pilots focused on the need to develop services which respond to the needs of local communities and which supported “hyper-local” service provision – including local improvement and local budgeting. The local services pilots were built around local engagement between communities, governments and SMEs in order to develop new delivery approaches that enabled greater local control of service design and service delivery. The lessons from these pilots will eventually be mainstreamed, with their lessons incorporated into service design and delivery.
- Channel and Content Strategies pilots developed frameworks to identify the appropriate channel and content choices to use when designing and delivering services. When targeting specific groups they also worked to promote inclusion. Partners worked with citizens to develop more targeted and more appropriate ways of communicating with citizens that improved the value of local services. This included using both personalised and localised content.
There are strong links between these Developing Smarter Services themes and those in the other LIKE! work packages on ‘Creating a Local Digital Innovation Culture’ and ‘Digital DNA’.