Embedding customer insight into the corporate culture Cheryl Coppell, London Borough of Havering
1. Embedding Customer Insight into the
Corporate Culture
Cheryl Coppell
Chief Executive
London Borough of Havering
2. Where is Havering?
• Situated in Outer North East
London, Havering is the third
largest London borough by
area at 112 square kilometres
(43 square miles)
• The Borough is well
connected, with good rail and
road links to central London,
Stansted airport, the M25 and
ports in Essex and Kent
• Havering’s principal town
centre is Romford, followed
by the smaller town centres
of Hornchurch, Upminster
and Rainham
4. Population Projections
• Population +11.5% by 2021, faster
than London average
• This will be due to population
growth and positive net migration
• Increased numbers of health
conditions affecting older people
• Cancer
• CVD
• Respiratory illness
• Dementia
• Osteoporosis (& falls fractures)
• Pressures on related services
5. Deprivation
Ward No. of LSOAs IMD Average Rank
Gooshays 9 34.14 1
Heaton 8 31.91 2
South Hornchurch 8 22.30 3
Havering Park 8 21.85 4
Brooklands 9 19.72 5
Romford Town 9 18.15 6
Harold Wood 8 17.36 7
Rainham and Wennington 8 16.95 8
Mawneys 8 16.57 9
Elm Park 8 16.54 10
St Andrew's 9 12.94 11
Hylands 8 11.29 12
Pettits 9 11.10 13
Squirrel's Heath 8 10.84 14
Hacton 8 10.32 15
Emerson Park 8 9.89 16
Cranham 8 7.08 17
Upminster 8 5.97 18
6. Havering’s Health
Areas for Improvement
• Early help for vulnerable people in
the community
• Dementia – improved
identification and support
• Early detection of cancer
• Tackling obesity – 27% of Adults
• More integrated care for ‘frail
elderly’
• Focusing on our ‘Top 100 families’
• Reducing avoidable hospital
admissions
7. Challenges facing the Council
• Significant budget savings: £40m by 2014
• Very low grant base = high council tax
• Already very low unit costs of services
• Ageing population – disproportionate strain
on social care
• Some bureaucratic processes
• How do we deliver services more efficiently
whilst protecting those that really matter to
local people?
8. The Havering 2014 programme
• Transformation programme
will enable us to meet new
financial and service
challenges whilst supporting
culture change
• Need to bridge a funding
gap of £40 million over four
years
• Comprises eight separate
work programmes
9. Our Transformation Objectives
• 3 ‘change’ principles
– To be efficient, focussed and fair
• The sort of council we want to be is
– A council that works smarter
– A council that works with others
– A council that prioritises effectively
• Moving away from universal, prescribed services towards
personalised services targeted at people who really need
them
• Allowing customers to have more choice
• Need to have the insight that allows us to target customers
more effectively
10. Using Customer Insight to target services
• We have been developing a tool to target residents based on
their characteristics and preferences
• We first purchased Mosaic from Experian in 2006 – a generic
customer profiling tool based on “general” characteristics
• It made Havering look like a tale of two cities – not precise
enough
• In 2011, a new bespoke segmentation tool was built using our
own customer data sets form across the council and PCT as
well as new Mosaic data
• 12 different segments, specific to our population
• Allows us to identify at a household level the communication
preferences of our residents and which services they do and
don’t use
• This enables us to target the right services at the right people
in the right way
12. Aims of the Project
• Aims and purpose of the project evolved as the project
progressed!
• Consult with vulnerable older people on council services, to
encourage take-up and take feedback on services,
specifically:
• Older residents that are most in need of support or
direct services, and
• Older residents who may be unaware of the full
range of services they are eligible to use.
• Using Customer Insight, target consultation more
effectively
• Increase customer satisfaction with Council
• Developed into an early intervention model, using an army
of local volunteers
13. Targeting Specific Older People
• We used our customer segmentation tool to target
older people based on the following indicators:
– Low Income Pensioners
– Reliance on State Pension
– Not currently on social care register
– Low Household Incomes (<£13,499)
– Rented Homes AND home ownership (asset rich
cash poor)
– Low Savings
• It showed us that these people prefer face to
face contact → we designed a household visit
engagement model
14. Using Customer Insight to Target
Consultation
• This identified 5000 residents over 65
• Identified a sample of their addresses
• Plotted them on a map
• Contacted residents to arrange household
visits
• This meant we would be able to target
specific households that were definitely
within our target audience
15. Project Deliverables
Original Targets:
• 500 older people contacted or visited
• 150 referred to Council and Partner services
• Increased satisfaction of older people with council
services since last year
• Reduced avoidable contact by older people contacting
the council
Actual Performance:
• 1235 residents contacted and 564 visited in their own
homes
• 2824 requests for services or more information
16. Outcomes
• Early Intervention Successes:
• CAB advised a resident living in hardship who is now
£120pw better off
• Referrals to NHS Community services for dental
implants
• A number of older people were assessed for social care
support through Havering Direct
• Huge increase in aids and adaptations take-up
• Garden clean-ups
• Housing improvements identified
• £64,806 in unclaimed benefits identified
17. Other outcomes
• Increased skills of the volunteers
• Face to face service highly effective and well
received by customers - 98% satisfaction
• Cost savings of using volunteers (1152 hours =
approx £14,400)
• Key issues: social isolation, lack of awareness
of support
• We are now developing a volunteering
network based on this model ‘Activate
Havering’ to tackle social exclusion and
loneliness
18. A corporate programme of using
customer insight to target services
• Targeting Energy efficiency grants – 25% more take-
up than universal advertising approach
• Top 100 families profiling
• Direct Debits and channel shift
• Fostering campaigns
• Increasing Telecare take-up
• Embedding into CRM system to proactively refer
people to services when people call the council
• Free school meals
• Encouraging recycling
0-15 = 19%, working age 60%, 21% older population Highest proportion of older people of retirement age in London 5% of our population are over 80, compared to London average of 3% over 80 Low ethnic diversity (89% white, 11% BME) although this is predicted to grow over time
An extra 27,000 people by 2021 Population growth means more births and less people dying – pressure on services eg. schools Net migration means more people moving into the borough than leaving – pressure on services esp. housing
Overall Havering ranks 177 th out of 354 local authorities for deprivation = not very deprived 2 areas in Havering fall within the 10% most deprived in the country (Briar Road and former Mardyke estate)
Generally, the quality of life in Havering is very good. We have higher than average life expectancy. We are developing a Health and Wellbeing strategy with our CCG and Shadow Health and Wellbeing Board that will look at the following areas that are a priority for Havering. I want to ensure that we are targeting the right support at the people who need it the most.
The first Mosaic tool we purchased was too generic and not specific enough to Havering. We wanted something that would factor in all the information we currently had on our customers and which services they use – and what other services, such as payment by direct debit, we could be targeting specifically at them.
The project started out as a consultation and information sharing engagement project. Whilst the volunteers were carrying out household visits, by spending half an hour with older people in their homes, they were able to identify ‘early warning’ signs, such as evidence the older person was having difficulty carrying out daily chores or had work that needed doing to their homes to prevent slips and trips – they were able to make referrals to the relevant agency. The project became an early prototype for a volunteer-led early intervention programme we are setting up in Havering, based on this success.
If it wasn’t for the customer segmentation tool, we would never have been able to target precisely the older people we wanted to make contact with, who met our target group We really wanted to contact those older people not currently known to social services, so this tool helped us to do that by eliminating all the households that were on that register. Without targeting this engagement activity, we would probably still be knocking on doors now!
Actual Performance 1235 residents includes those visited at home using customer insight, as well as other older people we contacted through open days and other events at the hospital and other locations
Our 40 volunteers came from all walks of life: retired city workers, single mums, students, unemployed people looking to gain extra skills. Many of the volunteers went on to volunteer for our partner agencies such as Age Concern and CAB after the project finished, and we are still in touch with those who have said they would like to volunteer for the council again.
Even though we’ve achieved a lot so far, we are really at the beginning of our customer insight journey, and have a whole programme of work underway around targeting services more efficiently: Energy Efficiency grants such as Warm Zones – after targeting 500 households who met the criteria, instead of universal advertising of the grants in the Council’s Living magazine, which also resulted in a lot of disappointed people when they responded to the advert only to find out they were not eligible, in one month we managed to get an extra 25% more people taking up the offer of energy repairs than last year by targeting only those homes who our segmentation tool told us were eligible. This equated to 70 new boilers (amongst other energy efficiency measures) – at a cost of £3000 per boiler, this amounted to £210,000 savings for people at risk of fuel poverty in Havering Top 100 families – currently profiling the top 500 families identified to help build a profile of the average complex family, which will then inform our strategy for earlier identification of families before they reach crisis stage DD campaigns planned, to shift residents who are able to pay by DD, away from high cost payment methods such as face-to-face Increasing the number of foster carers – we are currently profiling our current foster carers to help us target our next marketing campaigns to recruit more foster carers We currently have very ambitious targets to increase telecare and telehealth take-up to help people with long-term conditions live in their homes independently and safety, for longer. We are using customer insight to target people who may benefit form this service, as part of our overall prevention strategy to keep people out of hospital. Embedding into CRM system – so that every customer record is linked to a segment. When they contact the council, customer service advisors will see prompts on their screen, generated by the segment the customer is in, to ask them about related services or ways they would like to be contacted by the council. We think that this is where the big savings could potentially be released, as well as going a long way to improve customer satisfaction with the council.