Ashford Borough Council: Wasting a good tool

A good example of how the web can be used to enhance a service – but also of how easy it is to turn better into worse.

The Site

The local government authority for the southern England town of Ashford has an Online Services section on its website reachable from a right-hand Quick Links panel on all pages.

Among the services listed is Bulk Refuse Collection, for which householders are charged a fee to have large items of rubbish such as furniture removed. A link from the Online Services page to a Bulk Collection Calculator Tool enables residents to work out the cost of disposing of one or more items. These can be selected from a lengthy dropdown list and added to a Current Items form which shows how many ‘points’ an item is valued at (the more awkward the object the higher its score) and the total charge for the items selected to date. The menu can be searched using a simple ‘Begins with’ panel and objects can be deleted from the list as well as added to it.

The calculator is, however, a standalone tool. The ‘order’ cannot be processed further online and no other form of contact is offered for following up the enquiry. A visible left-hand link under Council Services to Waste Collection and Recycling leads to a general information page about the council’s responsibilities and provision.

The Takeaway

As in many other countries local government in the UK is energetically putting its services online as part of a wider embrace of e-government. Ashford’s Bulk Refuse Collection is a good example of how the web can be used to enhance a service – and also of how easy it is to turn better into worse.

The Calculator Tool of itself is both a good idea and user-friendly, with the simple search feature being particularly helpful. Residents can see how the service is priced and find information in their own time without having to run the gauntlet of a switchboard or call centre The council meanwhile cuts out the need to handle the initial enquiry.

But that, frustratingly, is as far as it goes. The tool’s form cannot be e-mailed to the refuse service or otherwise used to translate the enquiry into a request for service, so negating the advantage to the council as well as the resident. Indeed, the feature is devoid of any ‘call to action’ – there is, for example, no phone number or e-mail for contacting the refuse service itself to arrange a collection.

Until the council thinks through how to integrate the online service into its refuse collection system it will continue to turn a genuinely useful tool into a customer service liability and a waste of its resources.

First published on 04 October, 2005