The brief
Bramwell’s online services portal had a completion rate of 31%. The other 69% of people gave up halfway through a form and called the contact centre — which was, by any measure, the most expensive customer service channel the council operated.
The council had already rebuilt the portal twice. Both times, the rebuild started with a form library. Both times, completion rates stayed flat.
What we did
We threw out the form. We started with the question — literally, a single text box on the homepage that said “What do you need help with today?” — and let an intent model route citizens to the shortest possible path. Sometimes that path was a form. More often it was a phone number, an article, or a one-tap action.
Three things we deliberately did not do
- No chatbot. Citizens don’t want to talk to a robot at 11pm; they want their problem solved.
- No login wall. 62% of council interactions are once-a-year — login friction destroyed completion in v1 and v2.
- No “guided tour”. If you need a tour, the product is wrong.
The thing I’m proudest of isn’t the completion rate — it’s that our contact centre staff finally have time to handle the calls that genuinely need a human. The portal is doing the easy stuff so we can do the hard stuff.
James Okafor, Head of Digital Services, Bramwell DC
The result
Form completion went from 31% to 92%. Support tickets dropped by 44%. The Net Promoter Score for the portal — which had been negative for three years — climbed to +52. The biggest win, though, is harder to measure: the contact centre stopped being a complaints department and started being a help desk.
