This article is written by Catherine Hope, Data Analyst in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Digital in the UK Government.

  • The problem: A lack of data from tens of thousands of calls per week from parents using the Child Maintenance system in the UK.
  • Why it matters: Poor data capture leads to inefficient services for citizens.
  • The solution: A new data source which records insightful data, leading to better services for parents using the Child Maintenance system.

I’m Catherine Hope, a Data Analyst at DWP Digital. I’m really pleased that One Big Thing, an annual initiative for all civil servants, is focusing on data this year. It’s a great excuse to talk about my favourite subject!

I work in the Digital Service Children area of DWP Digital, and we’ve recently created a new data source which will help us to make better decisions for parents to be able to access the help, advice and financial support they need.

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What is child maintenance?

We want to make it as easy as possible for people to apply for and manage their child maintenance arrangements. Child maintenance covers how a child’s living costs will be paid when one parent does not live with the child. It’s made when one parent has separated from the other parent or if they’ve never lived together.

UK citizens can calculate the child maintenance they owe or are owed online. If an arrangement doesn’t work between the two parents, the Child Maintenance Service (CMS), will arrange it. Parents can pay directly, and CMS will reassess payments each year, or the paying parent can pay CMS, and we will pay this to the receiving parent – this is called Collect and Pay. You can find out information and apply online, we contact the other parent, make a calculation and set up payments.

There’s also an online account that lets parents check their payments and report some changes of circumstances online, called My Child Maintenance Case.

What data do we have?

We have lots of management information and data from our case management system. We know how many people are using our online services to get information, apply and manage their cases.

What we’re doing as civil servants is really important. We need to have the data to create the insights that help us to make the right decisions.

People can also phone us to talk about their case, ask questions and provide evidence. We get tens of thousands of calls per week, with thousands of telephony agents and caseworkers answering those calls. 

We monitor how many calls we get each day, how long they take and how quickly we answer them. We’ve got lots of technical details about the call handling, but… 

What data did we not have?

However, in the past, we didn’t know why people were calling us. That seemed like a pretty important thing to know, so we could understand what citizens need from us. Once we could understand this, we could start making plans on how to improve the information we give, and the ways we give that information.

Our telephony system was standalone, not connected to our case management system. There was no way for an agent to record anywhere what the call was about.

Collecting this data

If you want something to exist, sometimes you have to make it yourself. So, we did.

The team created a screen in the case management system that summarises the contact information we hold for a parent, called the Contact Summary Screen.

We knew it would be so useful for our agents to see when the parent last called us, and what that call was about, especially when answering a call from that person.

We added the ability to record each inbound phone call, with a reason and an outcome. There are pick lists for both of these that the agents can choose from in seconds. Now the agent can see any recent contact to help them understand the case history. This saves time repeating information, allowing our agents to help our citizens faster and offer a better-quality service with more tailored advice.

With that data on the case management system, we can now aggregate it to look at how many calls we receive for each reason. Not only that, but we can also tell whether the parents who are paying child maintenance call us about different things than the parents who receive child maintenance (spoiler: they do). We can further split the data by whether the case is a Direct Pay or one where we collect and pay.

The data has allowed us to challenge the assumptions we had been making about who calls us about what. We now know. We were right on some of those gut feelings, but we’ve also busted some myths with the data too.

What about other channels?

Our agents aren’t just making a record of inbound calls, they’re also doing it for outbound calls. We have an assisted digital channel to offer more ways of communicating with us, and we’re also recording the webchats they have.

Our case management system automatically records each time we send a letter, a text message, or an email to parents. We now have a much better understanding of the contact parents make with us, or we make with them.

The data is helping us to look at how many letters of what types we send, whether we could reduce our carbon footprint by reducing the number of pages we use and whether our parents could get their notifications online, instead of by post.

The Contact Summary Screen also holds the date that the parent last logged in to our online service. This means we will be able to tell whether they have been online or not when calling. This will help us to understand what sort of support they need, and whether we could try to get them to use the online service to answer some of their questions instead, freeing agent time to focus on other calls.

One Big Thing

The One Big Thing initiative is a great opportunity for all of us to think about the data we need to do our jobs better. As part of the training modules, we will look at data collection and how we can all be involved, not just those in the data professions.

What we’re doing as civil servants is really important. We need to have the data to create the insights that help us to make the right decisions at the right time to deliver exceptional results for millions of citizens.

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