Product strategy 2021 to 2023

Setting the direction for our product and platform teams at Citizens Advice

Product strategy for Citizens Advice: cover image

[Update: see this blogpost from May 2022 for a Year 1 update on progress]

This strategy explains what we’re going to do to transform Citizens Advice products and platforms over the next three years. Digital technologies have created new ways to serve clients and we must be able to keep pace with modern expectations, meeting more demand in a tailored and streamlined way.

In this blogpost I will explain the context and our aims, describe our vision and guiding principles, and set out the 4 workstreams that will deliver on these ambitions. You can also watch a video of me talking through the strategy if that format works better for you.

The time is right for a full product strategy for Citizens Advice. The main drivers for writing this strategy are:

Adaptability: The organisation is at a significant turning point. As the country faces ongoing uncertainty around COVID-19, we need to solidify and codify the progress we’ve made giving remote advice, and adapting to a massive change in the type of issues people need help with. This has accelerated the modernisation of the service that began in 2013.

Scale: With widening inequality in society and increasing levels of detriment and poverty, we expect more people will seek and/or need our help; therefore we need the ability to scale.

Cost: Like all public sector organisations, we’re striving to maintain cost effectiveness whilst ensuring quality and continuity of service. The better use of digital is the only way to scale advice cost-effectively.

To mitigate this financial risk and to prepare for the growing need for advice, active investment in online channels has never been more important.

Guardian video using Citizens Advice web data to track public concerns through the COVID pandemic.

What we aim to achieve

If we successfully deliver this strategy, over the next 2–3 years we will have achieved:

• The ability to measure the impact of our online services, and therefore the ability to continuously improve our products and make better informed decisions about future direction in line with client needs and our market strategy.
• A better client experience of interaction with Citizens Advice and connected services.
• A sustainable financial model, where we are able to give tailored advice across multiple advice areas in an efficient and cost-effective way.

Keeping up with modern technology and digital services is actually a forever task, so we will redesign our cost model to be appropriate to this way of serving our clients. Although many of the major workstreams will be delivered by the new directorate, this is a whole organisation task and will need everyone’s buy-in.

Progress so far

Over the past 4 years we have established in-house product and platform teams to support the organisation’s future ambitions. We’ve hired experienced digital, data, and technology leaders; establishing a new joined-up function across these areas and bringing products and platforms under a single Head of Product.

We’ve mapped all of our advice services end-to-end as part of our mission to create what we’re calling the ‘seamless customer journey’ and hired a dedicated team to lead and coordinate our efforts towards this goal.

We’ve paid down a significant amount of technical debt, including: replacing our outsourced case management system with a bespoke in-house service; modernising our data pipeline and replacing our existing extract-transform-load process; and migrating to a new content platform to enable flexible digital delivery of advice content (ongoing).

Meanwhile, we’ve continued to create new products for debt advice, energy advice, and consumer issues such as our online scams helper.

We’ve done this while growing the size, experience, and capability of our teams. This strategy aims to build on this good progress and to take us from ‘fixing the basics’ mode into delivery of better client-facing services.

Content as a service: migrating our content onto a flexible, modularised platform

Vision

We will amplify our market position as the best U.K. advice service; providing clients and advisers with accessible, tailored advice that helps them understand their rights and solve their problems quickly and easily.

We will improve the experience and outcomes of our clients, and use technology to rethink how we operate as an organisation so that we continuously improve our products while enabling scalable, cost efficient, and responsive advice delivery.

We will achieve this through 4 workstreams:

1. Radically improve our ability to measure outcomes
2. Enable a seamless customer journey, starting with referrals
3. Validate our tailored, tactical advice strategy through real-life delivery of services
4. Transform our phone, webchat, email, and video advice platforms

Guiding principles

Our product strategy will be enabled by working to the following principles, which will direct and frame our action in certain directions. This overall approach aims to overcome the challenges identified in the introduction.

• A relentless focus on client outcomes and client experience
• Being data-informed in our decision making
• Connect market ambitions with our product strategy
• Multidisciplinary and cross-functional working
• Agile and iterative processes that are able to respond rapidly to change
• Investing in common platforms and components that can be reused across advice-areas

We will align our product work around the impact we’re aiming to have. By doing this we:

• better describe the ‘why’ behind our work
• give our product teams clear outcomes to work towards
• align our product strategy with our organisational aims of advice and advocacy
• move away from prescribing solutions in favour of achieving outcomes

Workstream 1: build measurement capability

Our data is one of our organisational strengths, differentiating us from other advice providers and allowing us to examine trends on an unrivalled scale. Our recent ‘Life Through Lockdown’ report is an excellent example of how we use this insight to improve our services and better support our clients.

However, while our data analysis capability is the best in sector, the infrastructure that underpins this includes many manual processes. We also fail to consistently measure outcomes, instead relying more on basic measures such as page views or service uptime.

Our lack of outcomes measurement means we risk missing opportunities to serve clients by understanding their need across multiple touchpoints. We want to change this so we have the right data to make the right decisions. This workstream is foundational for the other workstreams.

Our intended outcomes for this workstream are:

• The ability to measure what we care about and make better decisions
• Product and platform teams have the information they need to improve services for users
• We can derive insights from our digital services that help us be more efficient and effective
• We can demonstrate our full value to current and potential funders
• We have the right infrastructure to share data with collaborators internally and externally

To do this we will:

• Build on the foundational infrastructure work of the Data Platform team; bringing in further datasets from different advice channels
• Collaborate with Market and Operation Leads to align product work with organisational aims and funder expectations
• Give teams goal-setting skills and good infrastructure from the start e.g. data analysts and coaching in goal-setting

Workstream 2: enable a seamless customer journey

People expect a modern service to feel seamless as they move through different advice areas, channels, and touchpoints. As we scale up our remote delivery of advice, we need to hide or remove internal silos to create an experience that is joined-up, regardless of internal processes.

We will start by improving referrals as the part of the client journey with the biggest potential return on investment. This will improve our relationships with partners, break down internal barriers between services, improve the overall reputation of our service, and improve client satisfaction and outcomes.

Our intended outcomes for this workstream are:

• Referrals are ‘warm’ meaning we refer clients to partner services with their consent, and provide relevant information about their needs and circumstances
• We keep clients engaged throughout their end-to-end advice journey
• We reduce drop-offs and abandonment rates following referral to another service
• We improve retention and completion rates following referral from another service

To do this we will:

• Establish a referrals team to enable referrals of clients between services. The team will consist of user research, service design, product, and engineering.
• Decide on in-house / supplied / combination product approach and deliver to this approach

Workstream 3: validate tailored, tactical advice strategy

Our investment in digital, technology, and data is significant and predicated on the assumption that digital products are more scalable and can meet more demand. This workstream is mainly focused on enabling future investment decisions, and on validating the assumption that tailored, tactical advice online will be more cost-effective and cheaper to run than adviser-enabled services.

Our intended outcomes for this workstream are:

• Clients easily find online advice that’s relevant to their situation
• Self-service advice online solves most client problems without needing to contact an adviser
• We find new and different ways of reaching more people with our advice
• Tailored advice services online are the most cost-effective way of meeting client needs

To do this we will:

• Prototype 2 new tailored advice services in the first year, to test and iterate our hypothesis
• Redesign our public advice website to be fully accessible in line with WCAG 2.1 web accessibility standards
• Establish common design patterns and components that can be reused across advice areas
• Experiment with more proactive approaches to audience development and improve the reach and relevancy of our advice content, for example by improving Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Workstream 4: Transform our phone, webchat, email, and video (‘remote advice’) platforms

The importance of our adviser-enabled* channels has never been higher — during COVID-19 we’ve seen demand increase by 150%. This is a organisation-wide programme of work over 2.5 years that will fundamentally transform how we deliver advice to the public.

*when clients speak to a person, in contrast to our self-service advice online

Our intended outcomes for this workstream are:

• The overall user experience of phone, chat, email, and video advice is improved, bringing the same client-centred design approach to these channels that we have to our online services
• The overall efficiency and capacity of these channels has increased
• Internal processes are smoother and data is joined-up behind the scenes

To do this we will:

• Establish a multidisciplinary team including product management, technology, user research, service design, change management, procurement, communications and delivery roles
• Procure and incrementally roll out new telephony and webchat platforms
• Develop new operating models for the provision, support, and management of these channels

Phasing of the workstreams

This is a 3 year strategy, which means that not all workstreams will be running concurrently and some elements will start later. For example:

• Remote advice platforms: in the first year (April 2021 — March 2022) we will be focusing on replatforming our phone setup as the priority channel for clients, with other remote channels to follow in future years.
• Referrals: our first step is to find a long term funding source for this work before we can begin to develop an internal product for local offices and partners to use. We’re exploring interim options for enabling referrals in the meantime.

Success measures

When designing change, it is important to know how we’d recognise success. Here is a non-complete list of overall success measures to give a sense of what we value.

Quantitative measures: reduction in cost to serve; reduced failure demand across local offices from clients who couldn’t self-serve; improved client satisfaction, complemented by better feedback loops; and increase in overall demand met.

Qualitative measures: improved reputation in the independent advice market; improved support for core advice areas in line with demand; happier and more productive product teams due to clear and outcome-led goals; Citizens Advice is a more attractive employer for mission-driven digital specialists.

An example of our recent recruitment campaigns

What is needed to make this happen?

To make this strategy a reality, the whole organisation will need to buy into the direction described and be prepared to make the changes to enable it. As Head of Product my job is to help make this happen. Some wider organisational changes we’re aiming at are:

1. Adapt our governance model to more effectively support product delivery
2. Change our recruitment and people offer to attract and retain diverse digital specialists
3. Remodel our product management discipline to provide enough capacity, creating the flexibility to handle in-year product consultancy and new initiatives
4. Evolve our funding model to support long-term, sustainable product and platform delivery:

• fund the costs of product capability centrally, with clear budget ownership
• invest in outcomes and capabilities, not feature-like deliverables
• allocate a proportional level of advice-area specific (‘restricted’) funding towards shared components, platforms, and features that multiple services benefit from