Giving money back — our journey to make refunds easier

We have been taking a detailed look at some of the different services across the Newham council that deal with refund requests from residents or businesses; such as parking permits, planning and building control or adult education. We wanted to look at how these different refund services are operated and where digital solutions could improve them.

In the case of parking permits, residents currently request a refund for their existing permit by sending a letter to the council. The process to get that refund back can be lengthy and complex for our people, and feedback says can be a confusing process for residents.

As most of the resident refund requests occur for the parking permits, we decided to start solving some of the problems in that area first, with consideration given to how we can reuse the outcome in other areas in due course.

We’re on a mission to improve the experience for both staff and residents at Newham. Below is how we’ve gotten to where we are, some findings and where we’re going next.

Starting with the users…

We began the project with a Discovery phase; conducting user research and interviewing officers at different departments dealing with the various refunds.

We looked into different interactions a resident has with the service, and what steps take place within the council. We realised that the path residents have to take in order to request a refund isn’t as simple as it could be. And having to request a cancellation and a refund by post has a big knock-on effect for the contact centre, too.

We looked at how our people process the requests and what systems are in place at each stage to help them do this. This gave us a detailed interpretation of all the steps between a resident sending the letter to receiving the money.

Next, we identified the pain points on those process ‘journeys’. This meant understanding what is, for example, slowing down the processes or causing a bad user experience for residents and staff. We looked at touchpoints and hand-offs, individual steps (literally in some parts) within the teams and reviewed the systems that underpin them to understand where value is created and time spent.

By doing this, it became clearer why the experience is less than optimal and where we needed to focus the improvement efforts that make a real difference.

“The refund process is done manually now — if there was a way to do it automatically that’d be helpful.”

Turning research into improvements…

Using our deep understanding of the user journey from start to end, it was clear on how to transform the resident experience and we’ve built a backlog of changes that we’d like to take forward, test and deploy for residents, visitors and businesses.

We were also able to create a backlog of solutions to eliminate time-consuming manual processes, which we are now starting to trial.

These are all wrapped up in our Alpha phase, in which we design, prototype and test software and digital products for internal and external use. As an example, initial form prototypes were tested with real users and improved accordingly in an iterative manner to make sure the user experience is clear and effortless. And we’re exploring how we can use notifications to inform users of their cancellation request status to avoid the uncertainty that currently drives high call volumes to the contact centre.

So, what’s next…

We are nearly at the end of the Alpha phase and soon ready to move into the Beta phase.

This means that our online forms to request a parking permit cancellation and a refund will be accessible on Newham.GOV.UK, after which these requests will be processed in a digital backend. We can then also start making changes according to real-time user feedback.

This project is a small but important step in transforming council services for the digital age, and we’re looking forward to seeing the response from users when it ‘hits the streets’ in the coming months.

This blog was co-produced by London Borough of Newham’s Digital Services team and Rainmaker Solutions, their Strategic Digital Partner.