Few organisations, public or private, touch as many lives as HM Revenue and Customs. Almost every adult in the UK will deal with the tax authority at some point, often at moments of real stress, and rarely by choice. Getting customer experience right at that scale, for people who would often rather not be customers at all, is a challenge like almost no other. That challenge was put to the test this year when the Institute of Customer Service published its annual survey, and HMRC landed at the very bottom of the public sector ranking. Speaking on It's Personal, the CSW podcast with KPMG, HMRC director of customer experience, Claire Walsh, brings up the results and explains why they are a driver of change. “We were deeply disappointed,” she says, adding that the survey “reminds us that we've got a way to go. We are going to do better.”
That determination runs through the whole episode in which Walsh and John Swift, who leads the industry innovation and external learning team within her directorate, talk about small businesses, bereaved customers, and the millions of people who just want to pay their tax as easily as possible. Their experiences echo what KPMG's Citizen Experience Excellence research has found: people want to be remembered, recognised and respected. Here is a flavour of the conversation, but the episode is worth a listen in full if only to find out why HMRC's award-nominated app campaign features a pizza with a human face.
Start simple, whatever the scale
Where does an organisation dealing with every adult in the country even begin? For Walsh, the answer lies in the HMRC charter and its seven commitments, including making things easy, being right first time and keeping customers' data secure. The logic is that ease drives compliance: if people can pay their tax easily, they will.
But good intentions need evidence behind them, and what has been missing until recently, Walsh says, is a view from the moment someone first gets in touch to the moment their issue is resolved. In the episode, she explains how HMRC is moving beyond surveys and individual touchpoints to understand the entire customer journey. Listen to the full episode.
Rebuild broken customer journeys
The most moving illustration of that journey-first approach is Swift's account of the transformation in the bereavement service. Two years ago, the department set out to restructure its support for bereaved customers: people dealing with the tax affairs of someone they have lost, often at the most difficult time of their lives.
When his team mapped the internal processes involved, the result covered a wall about 20 feet wide and eight feet high with post-it notes – and they still didn’t have enough space for it. The exercise showed that thousands of processes, each introduced for a good reason at some point, just didn’t quite line up. So, the team stripped the journey back to what a bereaved customer actually needs. The team also looked after the people delivering the service, introducing rotation, better training and emotional support for staff handling distressing calls day after day. This effort, which earned HMRC an Institute of Customer Service award, is still not perfect, but it is a world away from where it was.
Learn from everyone
Both guests believe in looking outwards. Walsh has made it a personal commitment, visiting private sector leaders and fellow tax authorities to work out what can be translated back to HMRC. Swift and his team host events designed to get past the polished conference presentation, including Dragons' Den style sessions where industry figures and other departments worked through shared problems and pitched solutions to a panel of HMRC senior officials. Listen to the full episode to learn about what made people open up, and how one such idea became the seed of a “voice of the customer” programme that will see thousands of non-frontline colleagues listening directly to the customers they serve.
Technology is only 20% of the answer
HMRC wants 90% of customer interactions to be digital by 2030, but Walsh is adamant this is not a volume game. What matters, she argues, is a “good 90%” built on easy, high-quality digital services, with automation going further so that millions never need to interact with the service at all.
New technology will help, but Walsh believes it can only take you so far and shares a piece of advice from one of HMRC's non-executive directors: driving customer centricity into an organisation is about 20% technology and 80% changing its mindset. The strongest statement of that intent came ten months ago with the appointment of Myrtle Lloyd as HMRC's first chief customer officer. Lloyd is a friend of the podcast, having joined It's Personal in November last year, and her episode is available to listen to in full.
For his part, Swift closes this episode with a wish: that customer experience becomes so embedded across government that a job like his is no longer needed.
Listen to the full episode of It's Personal wherever you get your podcasts.