Over the last year our Digital Transactional Services team has been developing our new ‘My Account’ product. When we released our beta version back in October, it was in its ‘Minimum Viable Product’ form which we chose to soft release.
Although the product was live and available to the wider public, it was only communicated to a select group of users. Doing this on a small scale helped us gather feedback, identify and overcome any teething problems and improve the likelihood of product acceptance as we continued to make improvements to functionality.
Our initial feature allowed the citizen to create and verify a login and access information on personalised waste and recycling collections. This was user tested with our contact centre staff and we received lots of very useful feedback that allowed us to fine-tune the login process.
New Council Tax feature
We have since soft released an additional Council Tax feature which required the development of a more complex verification process to confirm the user’s identity and match this with details held in our system. The Council Tax feature live on My Account offers:
- access all your accounts for which you are liable
- view your charge for the current year and any outstanding balances across all years
- view any discount or exemption applied to you
- payment amount, method and date
- previous transactions
- upcoming transactions if you pay by Direct Debit
- view and download your bill
As we continue to add new features to My Account the customer will only need to login once with their personal information but each new service that we add will need to be verified as it is added. User testing of the verification process will be of paramount importance before any product is launched.
Help us test My Account
We are encouraging staff members who are Stockport residents to help us by setting up their own accounts and feeding back any issues or suggestions for improvements to content.
If you are a Stockport resident please do try it out: https://myaccount.stockport.gov.uk/ and email us your comments and feedback.