Talk
Creating a hub of digital services to better serve the public and reduce demand
Thursday, September 7
12:30 – 13:15
Conference Room
Clémence Debaig
Director, WAE: A Globant company
Since 2013, we have worked with the Metropolitan Police (the Met) to develop and implement a customer centred strategy, answering both the needs of the police and the public in the 21st century. Our vision is and continues to focus on addressing the universal public need for a digital channel as helpful, personal and reassuring as approaching an officer on the street.
Since April 2016, we have worked closely with the Met and our technical partner to build the foundation for change; launching a Beta website in October 2016 and officially going live in March 2017 at beta.met.police.uk
Critical to our success has been transforming the organisation in parallel. You can’t bring offline services, online, without addressing how this new system will work within the remit of officers and staff’s daytoday activities. We were fully embedded within the Met, ingraining a more agile and customercentric way of working even training 1200 officers.
We know people only interact with the Met when they have to transact, so the overall approach on the site is action and task orientated. By using interactive triage tools, the public can now find the right information they need, narrowed down to their specific situation, as actionable as possible. Making the public selfsufficient has helped the Met reduce the volume of people that would have called for information.
The new website helps people understand they have an important role to play in keeping themselves and their neighbourhoods safe and provides the information they need to do so. Explore your area and see for yourself, the top crimes and datadriven crime prevention advice beta.met.police.uk/yourarea/camden/holbornandcoventgarden/
The website offers a more convenient channel for services that were only available on the phone or at Police stations. Online road traffic incident reporting alone, demonstrates how this transformation has benefited both the public, the Met and the safety of London as a whole. Previously, less than 5% of road incident allegations resulted in a Notice of Prosecution (NIP) being issued. An NIP must be issued within 14 days of the incident and due to the reports taking two weeks on average to reach the relevant department, time ran out. Now, in just the first four months, online reports have driven a 60% increase in NIP issue rates.
Signs of a channel shift are clear, and just day one of full launch brought 1 million visitors versus 375,000 the previous week on the old website, thanks to our focus on continual improvement, and the addition of new content since beta. Since the launch of the new online crime reporting tool in February, the Met has already seen a threefold increase in the number of crimes coming from online. Without any specific advertising of the service, it already represents 9% of all anticipated MPS crime reporting this is just the beginning and the future is bright.