When we built the new liverpool.gov.uk we built it to be measured, and now we have a much better picture of how it is used. By looking at the analytics we can see just what pages are not giving people the answers they want and causing them to have to contact the council in other ways.
When we started the redevelopment of the site we had over 300 email addresses and 100 phone numbers dotted around the site, and we had no clear idea how many of them were being used – it was a mass of tangled contact which was confusing not only for the customer but for the organisation.
tracking contact
For the new site we removed all email addresses and replaced them with contact forms, and we moved all phone numbers to specific contact pages. this has helped us in a number of ways.
Removing email addresses means we can control and track how emails enter the organisation, all too often personal email addresses where on the site, not only did this put a burden on staff it meant contact could be lost if a member of staff moved on.
Placing phone numbers on contact pages also means we can now track contact intent of our users. In order to get to a telephone number a user must click on the link for the number we can see how often this happens and align it with our actual call centre statistics to identify areas of the site that cause high contact.
Obviously once we’ve done that, we try to do something about it…