The Civil Service Reform Plan calls for departments to be less bureaucratic, faster and do more online. For the Student Loans Company this became an urgent priority when their world changed – and in response, they revolutionised the way they do business.
As if huge changes to student funding created by major higher education reforms weren’t challenging enough, the Student Loans Company needed to modernise its business operation and ICT systems so that they were more efficient and responsive.
Sustain and transform
The Company’s IT infrastructure is aging, slow and unreliable, so the Sustain Programme was initiated to first stabilise then improve performance, increase resilience and reduce the risk of failure. Significant strides were made to improve the system that manages many billions of pounds of customers’ loans, thus improving their experience, key software and information was migrated from old data centres, which had limited space and poor reliability, to more modern facilities which can vastly improved business continuity and underpin the drive for digital modernisation of student finance services, until the anticipated UK centralised data centres become available. It works out cheaper too – this interim solution comes with an average cost saving of 30% each year.
Longer term, the entire business is being of modernised. The Transformation Programme seeks to deliver this through core IT systems replacement, digital delivery, business improvements and organisational effectiveness.
Putting the customer front and centre
Underpinning these four components improved customer experience. And what better way to do this than ask the customers themselves? Models of the current and future customer experience were subject to extensive testing with customer groups. Their feedback was combined with the expertise of Government Digital Service, which has worked closely with the Company from the outset of the programme to design customer cutting edge digital the business solutions built around the needs of customers.
A new digital delivery team has been established to develop capability within the Student Loans Company, which uses ‘agile’ development techniques pioneered by companies at the forefront of the digital revolution, and is fast becoming an exemplar of digital delivery in Government.
The proof, however, is in the pudding – and new digital application website has been built using these techniques, and has seen overall customer satisfaction jump from 39 per cent to 72 per cent. Keen to build on this quickly, a similar application will be rolled out to all other students later this year.
Efficient and cost effective
The result ticks all the boxes from the Government Digital Strategy: it’s focussed on SME engagement, it is digital-by-default, it uses a customer-led service design and it seeks to build in-house capacity.
With successes already chalked up and exciting new working practices in place, the green- light has now been received to proceed with the delivery of the rest of the programme – so we are on course to end up with the best, most efficient and cost-effective system for all.
