The Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s consular service supports British people around the world when they are most in need of our help.
Consulates, embassies and high commissions publish their contact email addresses in the contact section of their pages.
I hear that sharp intake of breath. How generous of them when most others hide behind whizzy web forms or clever predictive answer tools.
In wanting to offer British people more access to us and contact channel choice we have created a problem in that most people contacting us are after another GOV.UK service.
In these cases we direct users to the information they need on GOV.UK.
This takes up a lot of time for our front line staff who we’d rather were helping people in difficulty, e.g. because they are hospitalised, arrested etc, and there is a risk of missing those emails sent in from British people in urgent need of assistance or not getting to them in a timely manner.
Publishing an email address in the clear is fodder for spam bots so yes, they get a lot of spam too.
At the moment most consulates handle their own emails. However, we have trained staff in contact centres who deal with similar enquiries on the telephone every day. Our plan is for the contact centres to handle all the email coming in, forwarding to posts only when necessary.
In order to facilitate this we will need to both reduce the volume of email and also in the long term acquire some software that will help the contact centres manage multiple mailboxes.
Phase 1: Testing Signposting Useful Information at Email Source
At the moment sending an email to a consular address results in a very long auto-reply listing the top ten things users are usually looking for: this is the self-help part. For those who need assistance, there is a request to email us again with a flag in the subject line to get an answer.
Not the greatest user experience.
Having looked at all the areas where the email address is published there is very little nearby which signposts the user to information they might be after on GOV.UK
Our first test is to replace the email address with a link to a contact page which lists links to UK Visas, UK Passports, Living in Guides, Marriage and other useful information on GOV.UK before offering the email address at the end of the page. We will also remove the very long auto-reply.
This will be piloted in one country for one month and will test if offering the user the information they might be looking for upfront, makes any difference to our email volumes.
The Next phases: simple web forms or smart answers
The next phase will probably involve the implementation of a simple web form but keep those links to our most common enquiries.
Following that we may develop some kind of Smart Answer tool like the marriage tool with a link to a form for those in need of urgent assistance.
Getting the language right here will be crucial – asking people if they need urgent assistance, for example, could be perceived by a user to cover their Visa problem. Visa queries are not a consular service so the customer would be directed to information on GOV.UK.
Will there still be people sending us emails about their Visas when all this is done? Probably, no solution will be completely infallible.
The most difficult thing will be striking a balance between rerouting the people looking for information on GOV.UK and still getting to those important emails from people in need. On this, we will be keeping an eye on the work done by the GDS finding things project which aims to make GOV.UK itself easier to navigate, to make sure that our content is well-optimised for search engines both on and off GOV.UK.
That is the beginning of Email Triage and I hope to continue to share how we are making things better for our users as we iterate through our ideas.