Mark Dearnley, CDIO, HM Revenue & Customs

1. Mark Dearnley
Chief Digital & Information Officer
HMRC: from paper and phones to a multi-channel
digital service
8 March 2016

2. 70%government
transactions
of all
41m
individual customers
5m
business
customers
15%
Net
reduction
in baseline
costs by
2020
£1.3bn
Reinvestment in
digital transformation
£517.7bn
revenue
HMRC at a glance

3. Our channels in 2014/15
220m
outbound
letters
50m
inbound
calls
300m consumer
740m business
£74m
print costs
16m
inbound letters
online transactions

4. that supports our Making Tax Digital plans
Webchat Telephone Face to faceSocial
media
Digital
services
Co-browsing
Moving to a multi-channel approach

5. • We’re running (we believe) the largest virtual
contact centre on the planet
• Can manage contact peaks more effectively
• Integrating telephony with scanned mail and new
channels like webchat and social media
• Rolled out to 22k staff
• Configured the hosted service in 9 months, and
migrated it in just 9 weeks
• And kept legacy service running while we
migrated!
A virtualised call centre

6. • Single, digital view of customer contact
• Supports our virtual network – any adviser, any
time can tell you how we’re dealing with your
query
• 8.9m live mail items scanned so far
• 537k items scanned in January 2016
• At peak, 7.2k items an hour being requested from
work queue for processing by our caseworkers
And scanning all our white mail

7. Personal tax
account
Business tax
account
Third party
software
Multi-channel Digital Tax Platform (MDTP)
ITMP ETMP
Customs and
Int’l Trade
3 core tax platforms
APIs APIs
Integration layer
Digital Tax Platform: underpins new services

8. • Pilots for both began in 2015
• For SA16:
 600 staff trained on webchat
 Webchat hours of service in offices were
extended to 22:00
 Working from home trial provided service until
midnight during final weeks of the peak
 Final chat finished at 1am on 1st Feb
 Monitoring of social media for customer
feedback, enabling rapid incident resolution
Webchat and VA: new ways to get help

9. • 257k interactions with ‘Ask Ruth’ virtual assistant
 Main queries for Ruth were lost User ID and/or
password
• 114k webchats between customers and HMRC
advisers
 Of these, over 77% confirmed they would
otherwise have phoned - this translates to
over 88k calls
Webchat and VA: seeing results during SA16

10. Launching co-browsing
• Sharing the customer’s screen during a webchat
session
• We’re starting by supporting customers logging
on to our digital services
• Next phases will help customers navigate their
online returns, forms and calculators

11. • Customers will be able to exchange data securely
with HMRC online
• Beta available for Personal Tax Account/ Agent
Online Self Serve in early 2016/17
• Text or email will prompt customer they have a
message in their secure inbox
• Will gather customer feedback at every stage of
design via our research team
Secure messaging coming soon

12. HMRCCustomers
• Can interact with HMRC via the
device of their choice
• A better service: satisfaction scores
for digital services routinely 80%+
• Help is available at the right time for
them
• Enables them to stay in the digital
channel, which means their issue is
resolved faster
• Can give one to many support,
increasing our productivity
• Where possible we can direct
customers to the relevant website
pages so they can serve
themselves
• But also provide one-to-one support
where a customer needs extra help
What all of this means for:

13. 480k more
returns online
(now 89% online)
paper down 21%
41k
less calls
(down 7%)
88k
further calls
deflected by
webchat
Phone
wait times
halved
(down to 5.16 mins)
Channel shift: comparing SA15 to SA16

14. • SA16 has given us lots to build on
• Business tax account users can already service
most of their basic needs through the account
• 2016 will be about growing the functionality available
to users while ensuring it is increasingly tailored and
personalised
• Personal tax account will see lots more services
coming soon! – something for most UK indviduals to
use and benefit from by the summer
• Now realising the HMRC ambition to provide the
right channel, at the right time, on the right device to
help our customers help themselves….
What comes next?

15. Thank you
Follow our progress at hmrcdigital.blog.gov.uk