Annex
SELECT COMMITTEE MEMORANDUM CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
(CMS)
BACKGROUND
1. The development of the Customer Management
System (CMS) started before the launch of Jobcentre Plus in April
2002. It was originally designed to support the Benefits Agency
in the assessment and payment of benefits, with a focus on improving
security and reducing fraud and error.
2. The process CMS was designed to support
did not require customers claiming the majority of benefits to
engage with a work focus agenda and was delivered solely by the
Benefits Agency. These customers were not required to attend an
interview with a Personal Adviser in order to claim benefit, as
is the case now in Jobcentre Plus Offices, and there was no need
for joint working with the Employment Service to establish a benefit
claim.
3. With the launch of Jobcentre Plus, bringing
together the Benefits Agency and the Employment Service, the process
changed considerably and CMS was adapted as much as possible to
support the requirements of the new joint agenda.
4. It is important to recognise that we are working
with cumbersome legacy IT systems originally designed completely
separately for two different organisations. That is quite a difficult
technical challenge. It is an achievement that with CMS we now
have, for the first time, a new system that can communicate with
those legacy systems.
CMS AND THE
NEW PROCESS
5. CMS now supports the Jobcentre Plus process
for people making a new or repeat claim to working age benefits.
The process it supports is designed to ensure accurate and timely
delivery of benefit and to underpin the delivery of a work-focused
service. Annex 2A gives more detail of the functionality supported
by each Release.
6. We are not simply introducing a new IT system
to automate a set of established processes but, at the same time,
we are radically changing the "front end" of the business
that system supports. The changes affect, and are visible to,
both staff and customers. In particular:
(a) customers now make initial contact by
phone to a remote Contact Centre and some preliminary details
are taken to establish basic entitlement and determine which benefit(s)
can be claimed;
(b) Contact Centre staff (a First Contact Officer)
then call back the customer at a pre-arranged time to gather full
details of the claim electronically for Income Support, Jobseeker's
Allowance and Incapacity Benefit and/or to arrange sending out
forms for other associated benefits, including Carers Allowance
and Bereavement Benefits;
(c) the First Contact Officer will decide, with
the customer, whether a work focused interview with a Personal
Adviser is appropriate (it usually is), book it for an agreed
date/time, preceded by a meeting with a Financial Assessor where
the claim is checked and evidence gathered/verified; and
(d) the Financial Assessor will clarify what
additional evidence or action is needed for the claim to be processed
and get a customer signature. Once these items are cleared, which
may not be straight away, CMS is updated and the claim is transferred
to the benefit processing teams for final processing; electronically
for Income Support and Jobseeker's Allowance, clerically for Incapacity
Benefit.
DELIVERY AND
PERFORMANCE
7. With any major change there is often a period
of "settling in" and this has been the case for the
introduction of CMS and the new processes that it supports. The
scale of the change has created challenges in maintaining the
provision of a quality service to customers and inevitably put
the business under pressure at key points. As a result of this,
customers claiming working age benefits have, of late, experienced
difficulties getting through to some of our contact centres.
8. We have put measures in place to address this,
including temporary adjustments to streamline business processes
to maintain customer service whilst we go through this transition
period; this includes the managed introduction of clerical process
in a minority of sites. We have also ramped up recruitment plans
supported by robust training programmes. These plans have been
successful and we have seen week-on-week improvements in customer
service since the beginning of September.
9. There are several issues that, we believe,
contribute to the current performance challenges we face in getting
the new processes bedded in and working effectively. These are:
— system performance: Initially we
encountered difficulties in terms of speed, capacity and reliability
of the system, in fact, not entirely to do with CMS itself but
also related to complementary systems that CMS relies upon. The
impact of slow running or no system availability was significant
for the sites affected and presented additional challenges in
maintaining delivery of customer services, as well as giving staff
a lack of confidence in the system. A series of technical releases
earlier this year addressed these issues and CMS now performs
well.
— System functionality: As with all
IT systems CMS has its limitations, which also need to be set
in context with the history of its development. For example, when
CMSR2 was implemented there was still a need for a number of "clerical
workarounds" and desk aids that added time to the process
and increased the scope for error. In addition, some information
that could have been collected electronically, such as the Local
Authority questionnaire to support Housing Benefit claims, was
not. These have since been addressed in CMSR3 that went live on
31 October 2005.
— Staff recruitment and training:
Contact Centres in particular have faced the difficult task of
recruiting and training a new workforce, often with little or
no prior experience in the business and, therefore, of benefit
issues. Learning and development is in place and is appropriate
to the demands of the job. But inevitably there are short-term
costs in terms of both training time and the need for training
to be consolidated with experience of live running. Recruitment
issues have also affected the Financial Assessor role in Jobcentres
to an extent although, typically, people in this role do have
some experience to draw upon. That said, effective delivery of
this relatively new role ideally requires a blend of customer
handling skills and technical benefit knowledge. Again this is
taking time to develop although underpinning learning and development
products are in place.
— End to end business processes: The
new process we have introduced represents a significant change
to the way we deliver our services and require our staff to operate.
It is essential that the new processes are clear and that staff
and managers have a good understanding of how the whole process
links together and the importance of getting it right at each
stage. This has not always been achieved and performance pressures
locally have meant that different parts of the business (contact
centres, linked sites and benefit processing) have, at times,
not fully appreciated the impact their actions have on others,
this is particularly evident when clerical processes are invoked
to cope with system and/or operational difficulties, although
this has become less problematic as system performance has improved.
In addition, to support staff and managers, we
developed, with user input, an improvement toolkit and a series
of workshops to promote better understanding and management of
the end-to-end process and its interdependencies.
— Affordability: At the same time
we are implementing a major efficiency programme to deliver the
required headcount savings in the SR04 settlement, from 76,000
staff in February 2004 to 65,000 in March 2008. It is therefore
essential that the processes are both deliverable and affordable.
The Standard Operating Model is under continuous review to ensure
we capture the experiences and best practice from live running
to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of the processes.
SUMMARY
10. What we are doing is clearly a radical
shift and we need to implement change both for people who are
familiar (and comfortable) with existing processes and others
who have little or no prior knowledge or familiarity. Moreover
this is against the background of further change in progress or
in prospect, crucially the organisational design review, the benefit
processing centralisation project and the completion of a "virtual"
contact centre network. So we will need to ensure the approaches
are regularly reviewed and refreshed as necessary and that progress
is maintained.
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