The Directorate of Citizen Information and Attention Services (DIAC) of Barcelona City Council addressed an ambitious project to adapt and optimize citizen-care services, an essential component of the required adaptation to the requirements established by the Law 39/2015 of 1 October, on common administrative procedure of public administrations.

Based on the results of a previous study carried out in 2017, the DIAC faced the fulfilment of the legally required process of digital transformation, taking the opportunity to define a new and optimal model of citizen care.

THE MAIN VECTORS OF CHANGE WERE:

• Focus on the provision of by-design citizen-centred services putting the citizenship at the core of the new model and strengthening the «citizen experience». • Prioritize procedural services over informational services, securing an appropriate motivation and proactivity of the awarded service provider to resolve the citizens’ requests in the first contact. • Ensure that calls are attended in the first instance by the agent with the best appropriate skills, minimizing transfers between agents, which involved: – Removing the Virtual Agent. – Optimization of calls’ queue management. – Prioritize calls that constitute retries of previous access attempts.

• Rethink the internal platform organization, making feasible a calculation of competences and a more agile and flexible resource management (agents with multi-profiles, profiles with levels) • Encourage the awarded service provider to manage the provisioning of the service based on an optimized calculation of resources with agents with multi-skills (multi-profile), requiring strict compliance with the defined Service Level Agreements (SLA). • Have the necessary calculations and reporting to allow distinguishing the number of retries to access a service (consecutive calls for a defined period of time). This information should make possible focusing management on citizen services, rather than on answered / abandoned calls. As a consequence, the concepts of “completed / abandoned service” and that of efficiency in the provision of services (number of retries to access a service) appear. • Review previous Service Level Agreements, in values and concepts. • Consider the reliability of the certification of the skills of the agents, managing the life cycle of the certifications issued by the awarded service provider (duration, termination, updates). • Improve the evaluation of the quality of calls’ attendance through deferred listening, making an individualized follow-up (by agent) of possible breaches and incidents.

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THE PUBLIC TENDER FOR THE TELEPHONE SERVICE AND DEFERRED SERVICES OF THE DIAC MADE IT POSSIBLE TO IMPLEMENT THE NEW VISION, ACHIEVING:

• An improved approach to citizen’s experience, putting citizenship at the core of the model. • Establish a tariffing system with the awarded service provider that promotes this approach, encouraging the resolution of citizens’ requests in the first contact, minimizing transfers between agent groups and preventing citizens from having to repeatedly explain the reason for their call. • A tariffing system that rewards processing services over other information services with lower added value, allowing citizenship getting their requests resolve at first instance. • Enable a self-service support service, so that citizens can resolve doubts about the procedures’ portal in an assisted whilst secure way, thus focusing on reducing the effects of the so-called «digital divide».

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