Tax credits got sorted out a lot easier this year – thanks to technology, says HMRC, which allowed a million claimants to get processed digitally for the first time.
The claims come in the form of a new blog on the Department’s website, where Angela MacDonald, the new Director General of Customer Services at HMRC, says the tax credits peak occurs in July every year, when claimants need to let the taxman know whether they wish to renew their application for tax credits.
The tax credits peak is a huge undertaking for HMRC , but 2017 was “our most successful so far”, with over one million customers choosing to use digital services, rather than paper or phone, to renew.
With the increase in digital support and more people than ever using the HMRC app, it’s also reduced the number of phone calls to its contact centres, she says.
“We know that many of the calls we receive are from people checking whether we’ve received their application or chasing its whereabouts in the system,” she writes.
“So this year we trialled a new SMS reassurance service, sending confirmation and update text messages to both digital and telephony customers. Our aim was to reduce the number of progress chasing calls and improve customer service through reassurance, and to encourage customers to use their Personal Tax Account (PTA) to check their renewal status and payment schedule.”
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The results, she says, have shown this was a good idea. For instance, the SMS service is coming to the end of an eight-week trial started in mid-June, with 99,000 customers having “completed the SMS journey”, and early results show a 47% channel shift (customers moving from telephony into the digital space) and a customer satisfaction score of 83%.
Since the Department introduced the HMRC app last year, a 200% increase in the number of users and a 400% increase in screen views has been tracked, with over six million views and one million sessions in July alone. A total of 38,000 people used the app to complete their tax credits renewal, and the current version of the app has a 92% customer satisfaction score and a 4.5 star rating, she says.
The taxman’s contact centre agents have also felt the benefit of digital services, she states supporting 170,000 customers using a range of digital tools including webchats, tweets, Facebook posts and Messenger Bot, meaning “fewer customers have called us when they needed help”.
And thanks to the introduction of robotics, the average time a customer spends on the phone with HMRC has reduced by up to two minutes per call, she claims.
“We’ve worked hard to create a really strong partnership between our operational frontline services teams and our digital teams. We’ve been able to combine customer services insight into customer needs, behaviours and journeys with digital ideas, expertise in the user experience and up-to-the-minute technical expertise. It’s enabled us to introduce new ways to make renewals easier and faster – and simpler for customers to track what’s happening with their application,” she claims.
McDonald ends by saying next steps include more work “with our fantastic digital colleagues” to make the process even better for our customers during next year’s tax credit peak.
