It’s Online, But Not As We Know It

When organisations successfully use technology innovation to help shift their customer transactions to the right channels, it often means moving interactions into a digital space. However only 73% of the UK population has internet access at home and older people and those from the D and E socio-economic groups are much lower. There are 9 million adults in the UK who have never used the internet.

This can make wholesale shift from offline to online particularly difficult for some organisations, particularly public sector bodies that cannot choose their customers; they have to serve everybody. Indeed many people with the highest intensity of government interactions are those least likely to have access to the internet and least able to use it.

The public sector is particularly challenged by lack of internet access given its recent commitment to delivering public services by digital means by default, as proposed by Martha Lane Fox (the Government’s Digital Champion) and accepted by Cabinet Office Minister, Francis Maude.

The good news is that new technologies are changing the way in which people access and use digital services making it simpler and less daunting. 2011 could be the year the PC is no longer the dominant route to digital services:

• Mobile internet access will continue to grow rapidly. Mobile phones are much more widely used that Internet access. There are over 132 active mobile connections per head of population and over a quarter say they have smart phones that can connect to the internet. This proportion doubled in the last couple of years, and will continue to rise rapidly. These people already spend nearly as much time using their phones to surf the net as they do sending texts.
• New services, such as YouView, will provide a mass-market way for citizens to access the Internet on their televisions. This new TV box from a range of partners including the BBC, BT, ITV and TalkTalk is expected to launch in the first half of this year and will provide a new way to provide online applications

With an increasing number of people with online access and a wider variety of devices, the challenge for public and private sector organisations is not simply about how they should provide services for traditional computers, but how they really understand their customers and integrate services across all their online and offline channels.

Photo thanks to russelldavies @ Flickr