Transcript

Never mind, I’m always worried that someone from that council might actually be in the audience.

And, you know, seeing this horror show, what could be worse than actually presenting about, you know, a critique of a, a customer’s website and they’re in the audience.

Well, what would be worse would be if they’re just presented directly before you.

So I apologise in advance, Sally and Mike, it’s it’s all said with love.

I’ll come back to this.

So before we do the dull presentation, let’s have a short quiz as in one question.

So one of my sales guys in holiday in Majorca right now.

So there is a prize of a better Wish services mug for anybody can tell me what is the bin day in Majorca Saturday?

Who said Saturday you won a prize?

Because every day in Majorca is bin day unless it’s Monday when you get collected twice.

So that’s got nothing to do this presentation.

But I just found out yesterday.

So in New Yorker, they pick up the bins every single day, twice on a Monday.

So if anyone wants to roll out that service, you’re going to need a computer system.

So we started the business in 1992.

I was employee number two and they haven’t got rid of me yet.

And it wasn’t until 2004 that we started working on our first council waste system.

So amazingly, that was 20 years ago.

And that is what the Bartek website looked like in 2004, believe it or not.

So, yeah, 20 years ago, I would just invite you to think back to 2004 and think about what your services looked like in 2004.

Yes, that is me.

Yeah, 20 years ago.

And I’m, I’m coming to a point with this.

20 years ago, your services probably looked very, very different.

Things have changed a bit in that time.

I still got the same hairdresser.

But you know, back in 2004, you might not have been on wheel bins, you probably didn’t have alternate weaker collections and maybe only a very rudimentary recycling service.

So things are are changing and that presumably is reflected in the way you talk to residents, the way you sell services to residents, the way you provide their service.

So thinking about how you communicate with residents, which is kind of what I’m talking about today, you’ve got to reflect on the changes that you’ve got within your council and how you’re presenting those to your customers.

So I brought up the John Lewis page.

This is John Lewis.

Back in 2005, it looked like that, which really, if you compare it to today, looks like this.

It’s more modern.

The phone number’s gone because they don’t want you ringing stores.

They’ve made the search function more prominent, but fundamentally, it’s kind of the same website.

It hasn’t changed a lot and that’s because John Lewis is still the same company, it’s still doing the same thing pretty much.

It’s got the same brand values, it’s talking to the same people.

So not much has changed in the world of what John Lewis fundamentally is.

So their website hasn’t changed a lot.

I’m not sure that’s quite the case for councils.

So as a council, we’ve got to look at, you know, what does a council like today compared to 20 years ago and compared to 10 years from now?

So you used to get a budget every year and spend it on whatever you wanted to spend it on that was going to keep the voters happy and, and, and so on.

But there’s no longer enough money from local tax and from central government funding.

So you’re having to sell services and they are not necessarily monopoly services.

Garden waste is, but things like commercial waste isn’t a monopoly service.

And your grounds maintenance stuff that you raise the money from is not a monopoly.

So you’ve got, you can’t think like a monopoly and just say here’s a service, do you want it or not.

So that’s the first thing that’s changing the business model.

Your service itself, as as I’ve said, it’s already changed in the last few years.

You’ve, I think most people in this room are here because they’ve got an optional subscription garden waste service that would have been unheard of 20 years ago.

You’ve quite possibly got paid bulky waste services with scheduling functions.

You’re probably offering a commercial waste service where you’re competing with, you know, the, the commercial operators That change isn’t stopping, quite the opposite.

So you’ve got coming up things like simply recycling, EPRDRS and God knows what else.

So even in two years after simply recycling, you’re probably going to be operating a very different service to the one you’re operating today.

And the final point, your customers have already changed massively.

So they don’t want to ring you up, they don’t want to use APC to talk to you.

So if we look at the stats from Sally’s system, 60% of all the gardenway subscriptions done on a mobile phone.

So if you’re out mowing the lawn, you’ve probably got your phone in your pocket.

So if you want a gardenway service, you’re going to do it on your phone.

People are not doing it through APC.

And we’re all used to instant gratification, which comes back to John Lewis.

You know, I do when I order something from them, I get a ping to say they’ve got my order.

I get a ping to say Fred’s picked it.

I’ve got a ping to say just put it on the van.

The vans around the corner, they’re just, you know, I’m bombarded with communication, which a is trying to tell me that they care.

It’s trying to tell me that they’re in control of the situation, you know, so we know what’s happening and it’s what’s expected from a, a modern service these days.

I don’t know of any council yet that is sending everybody a text message or a ping on a, an app to say we’ve just picked up your recycling.

Thank you for recycling.

It’s just not happening.

But it’s not difficult to do.

We could switch it on tomorrow.

It’s quite simple.

But I think the final point is that customers nowadays value convenience above price quite often.

So you know, I’ve had a lot of discussion about what price are we setting and actually people will pay a premium for a convenient high quality service.

And I would urge councils to be a bit more gung ho about actually pricing accordingly, potentially having tiered services.

So you can, you know, pay one amount for a weekly service and one amount for a four nightly service.

There’s all sorts of possibilities there if you actually think beyond, you know, the, the normal metaphor.

So I promised I’d upset Sally.

So this is a, a pretty normal example of a garden waste page.

And this is, this is Cheshire East.

So I’m, I’m not just critiquing Sally’s work, I’m critiquing me on as well.

I think, you know, we’ve already navigated to get to this page.

We’ve never get through the council home page into waste and recycling.

You know, we’ve probably made three or four clicks just to get to this bit.

And it’s quite difficult for a council that’s got 300 different services.

You can’t have every service on the home page, but you, you’ve got to find a way of actually letting people get there directly.

I think the QR code on the permit is, is one way of doing that, you know, short snappy URLs.

So if you want to access the Cheshire East system, you can go through the website or you can just go to bins.cheshireeast.gov.uk.

So there’s a separate sub domain that gets you directly there.

As Sally said, we’ve got quite attractive styling on the on the website and that carries through into the portal.

And I know Sally had to do quite a bit of arm twisting with, with comms and, and whoever to actually get approval to put a picture of a butterfly on the website.

They wanted it to look like that, which is what the rest of the website looks like.

So it’s it’s not great.

Is it like that?

Excuse me.

So bit of sales critique from this one.

Now this is actually slightly old.

So the first bit on the website where we’re trying to get people to sign up, the first thing we say is your BIN might freeze up.

That’s the very first thing we’re saying.

We’re not saying it now since July.

I did actually check this one.

You’ve sent that bit off, but actually all through the main sign up page, the first message on sign up was you’ve been might freeze solid, which is a bit like walking to a car dealership.

And the first thing to tell you about is you can get free, free breakdown cover it.

It doesn’t really sell the sell the service to its best light.

And there’s another bit to the right, which is related links or related pages and that’s the terms and conditions.

So on what is perhaps a sales page, we’ve got page the terms conditions and a problem that you’ve been might freeze up.

So it’s not quite that aspirational John Lewis thing of a, you know, a pretty good with a nice new coat on that you know, you can get for £35.

So the, the, the message is perhaps a little bit jumbled between are we trying to tell you about the service?

Are we trying to sell you the service?

So I think it’s just that clarity of thinking there.

So yeah, I would suggest you move all those terms conditions, get rid of them because nobody reads them.

I don’t think I’ve ever read the terms conditions on a website.

So yeah, nice bright colours drove people in and they’re very direct.

You can have one of these and it’ll cost you £40 to click here.

That’s the kind of direct selling that we we would recommend.

So another customer who’s hopefully not in the room.

So I’m going to say nice things about them.

This really it’s, it’s not a, a super pretty website.

There’s still quite a bit of text to it, but what this site does straight away, it talks about me.

It doesn’t tell me anything at all about Harrow Council.

It tells me about my address, about my bins, about my services, which is actually what I care about.

So it’s immediately engaging me with this is a page that I want to look at because it’s all about me.

And it also draws me to come back because it asks me at the bottom to click here to get a calendar sent to a reminder sent to my mobile phone for my collections every week.

So there’s a reason for me to come back here.

There’s a page about next week’s collections.

So it’s actually engaging.

It’s not just telling me.

These are the council’s requirements.

So finally, what has this got to do with the president of Iceland?

And Sally will tell you that we were actually trying to brainstorm a a good engaging title for a presentation.

And the title almost came before the content.

So I’ve got a title all back to this page here.

So this year Iceland elected a new president and as is their system, anybody can be the president of Iceland.

And they got a new website this year where you could do it all online.

So if you want to be the president of Iceland, you went online and you registered and put yourself forward as a as a nominee.

And then you needed a handful of your friends or people who supported you to 2nd your nomination.

They created, this is the the revised page, the first page combined all of those things into a lot of text, which is probably even harder to read on Icelandic.

But they combined all that into one page.

And lots of people who thought they were going to support a nomination ended up running to be president of Iceland.

And it made the news.

So yeah, literally dozens of people were then contacted to say, oh, you want to be the president of Iceland?

They went, no.

And there was one rather wonderful quote from a woman who said, oh, yeah, I, I didn’t mean to do that.

I didn’t have my glasses on.

So that was just a a sort of a throw to the website and the messaging actually matters.

So in closing, yeah, that was the in closing.

If anybody in IT says to you, we can build you a quick form for that.

Thank you very much.