But when it comes to visitor satisfaction, central government websites found more favour with the voters. However, Socitm believes the previous measure is the most critical performance indicator for websites, because visit failure is likely to lead to costly avoidable contact as people have to resort to the phone to access missing information. This is true even in cases where the website gave them most of what they wanted. And, whereas the cost of a web enquiry may be 23p or less, phone enquiries will cost upwards of £2.50 each. For this reason Socitm believes that even the local government average of 54% for visit success is much lower than it should be.
This apparent paradox is revealed in a supplement to Socitm’s bi-annual report on results from its Customer Access Improvement Service, which incorporates data from its Website take-up service (WTS) which measures usage of, and satisfaction with, local authority websites.
The supplement, Use of the web - local government compared with central government, is devoted to comparing data from the WTS with data from central government websites collected by the CoI and published in June this year in its document Reporting on progress: Central government websites 2009/10.
Information on visit success and user satisfaction has been collected from online questionnaires offered to individual website users. The questions put to visitors to central government sites were the same as those put to local government website visitors, but questionnaires were collected and processed differently. The local government data is based on returns from 122 councils, around one third of the total, whereas the central government data is based on 18 websites.
The total usage of the 46 websites reported on by CoI for March 2010 (unique visitors) was 38m, of which 82% were accounted for by the top ten sites, which included the ‘supersites’ Directgov, Business Link and NHS Choices, and also www.hmrc.gov.uk.Socitm’s estimated usage of all local government sites, also calculated for unique visitors, and based on an extrapolation of data from the 122 sites surveyed in the same month, was 23.5m. Visits per visitor during the month were 1.52 for central government websites and 1.48 for local government sites.
Value for money, based on cost per visit, can be compared across the two sectors. In central government this comes out at £0.23p which compared with the most recent published figure from Socitm of £0.39p, based on a small sample of local authorities for whom it has data. Cost figures for central government sites have not been verified and range from £11.78 for the UK Trade and Investment website, to less than 2p for the Defra website. Comparable sites show a wide range of results and there is little pattern suggesting economies of scale.
A further problem with the figures for central government sites, particularly the ‘supersites’, is that they specifically exclude advertising costs – yet advertising leads to higher levels of usage, and therefore lower unit costs per visit. Advertising cost associated with local government websites can be assumed to be negligible.
Finally, on website accessibility, there is a huge difference in results from the independent manual testing carried out on local government sites by RNIB, with 7% achieving level A, and the far less rigorous self-testing by central government sites that report a 90% success rate in achieving level A.
Martin Greenwood, Programme Manager for Socitm Insight comments: ‘It is interesting and informative to compare the performance of local and central government websites using the data available. But it is a shame that some important citizen-facing central government websites, like www.hmrc.gov.uk and www.nhs.uk (NHS Choices) have not reported on user satisfaction. And it is frustration that the true cost of major sites is not known because staff costs are obscured by outsourcing contracts.’
