Planning local services in Hammersmith and Fulham

Personalised service provision depends on understanding your customers: citizens. As the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham has proved, GIS is a vital tool in gaining this understanding. Putting residents first is the Council’s overriding priority and the Residents First vision is to provide a faster, more reliable service to all residents. This means improving access to council services so that residents can contact the Council in ways that suit them best.

Demographically, the borough is exceptionally diverse. Recognising this difference, the council sought to differentiate the way it provided services. Working with its strategic partner, the H&F Bridge Partnership (HFBP), the Council commissioned detailed customer insight work including the breakdown of services used by customers, individual access channel preference, and geographic location. This identified twelve discrete segments of customers, each with their own unique preferences and expectations of Council services. For each customer segment HFBP identified a set of service improvement priorities. At the heart of the approach has been a simple but rigorous commitment to use customer insight to inform both the strategic questions posed and the method through which they were answered.

The GIS-based analysis has changed much in Hammersmith and Fulham. The authority can now plan the location of different centres and potentially target information campaigns (e.g. door drops) right down to postcode level. They can also prioritise their wider service transformation programme (as part of Transformational Government) to deliver the right services online, quickly. The result of all this is clear to see. By understanding its customers, this particular authority has been able to design and deliver targeted services where they are most needed. That, in turn, means that the Council not only supports citizens better but also increases its own operational efficiency.