Digital

Paving the way to omnichannel

April 2, 2025 by deborahamzil No Comments | Category Content Design, Digital, Social Security Scotland, User-centred design

Guest blog from Emma Jones, Lead Content Designer at Social Security Scotland.

An accessible, inclusive way to communicate

At Social Security Scotland, we are at the start of a journey to move from ‘letters as default’ to a more inclusive, accessible approach. An approach where the method of communication meets the needs of the client. Our vision is a holistic, wrap around, seamless, omnichannel offer. Clients will be able to get communications from us, and communicate with us, however they want, moving from offline to online as they need to.

When our organisation was established, there was an assumption that a traditional letter was the most accessible mode of communication for every client. But this has limited the service we can offer. We have evidence that clients want to be able to interact with us in different ways, across different channels, depending on what they need to do. Some people want to manage their benefits online but might choose to speak to a client adviser if they have a complex problem. For some clients, paper letters are making our service hard to use and digital communications would enable them to interact with us.

A maturity approach

Omnichannel is the seamless and consistent integration of all channels. It means the experience is just as good online or offline.  The information clients have allows them to do what they need to do, no matter if they are reading an email or a letter, talking to a client adviser on the phone or exploring our website. This is our goal.

But we can’t move from paper letters to omnichannel in one jump. We need to take a maturity approach, whereby we take small steps to build our capability and test and learn what works. We can start small by designing emails for selected points on the client journey and then scale it when we understand what is needed.

Learning from past mistakes

I saw first-hand the issues with jumping from paper to digital when I worked at NICE (an advisory body for the NHS) in the 2000s. ‘Digital by default’ was a mandate set by the government that forced a change from printing and posting hundreds of booklets to NHS professionals every month to a PDF-only offer. The money savings were huge. But each NHS body ended up printing the booklets themselves, so the cost was essentially devolved. None of the money saved was reinvested into our digital publishing platforms and it was difficult to maintain and keep the content up to date.

Over time, we made all the PDFs (Portable Document Format) into HTML (HyperText Markup Language) which improved search and made maintaining the content a bit easier, but the user experience was getting worse as we added more and more content to the website. User expectations were also changing as smart phones became common and online shopping boomed. The experience on our website improved as we mapped user journeys and redesigned the content to mirror the tasks people needed to do.

Copy and paste doesn’t work

Designing an email isn’t as simple as copying and pasting the letter content into an email. We have a duty, under section 5 of the Social Security Act, to make our service inclusive and this means designing our communications to meet user needs. The current letters are not structured or designed to be read digitally. They are too long and too complex. We need to redesign them.

Another common misconception is that we can use email solely as a delivery mechanism: by attaching a PDF of the letter to an email. This would breach our duty under section 4 of the Act to make our service accessible. PDF attachments are also easier to target in phishing/cyber-attacks and government guidelines say we shouldn’t use them.

Designing emails with purpose

So, when we decided to make the Winter Heating Payment award letter digital, we started with the key purpose of the communication uppermost in our minds. In this case, it is a message saying we have awarded you Winter Heating Payment.

We thought carefully about what the client needs from the message and why.  We considered the data governance requirement to ensure we include information about automatic decision making. We wanted to make it easy for the client to learn more about Winter Heating Payment and automation so we added a link to mygov.scot and redesigned the content to ensure it would make sense to these clients. We added tracking to the link, so we can see how well it works.

Reusable blocks of content

In our design for Winter Heating Payment, we realised we could reuse one block of content. By focusing on the true purpose of the message we distilled the communication down to the smallest meaningful block of content. This block contained everything a client needed to know at a glance, and this made it a perfect candidate for the subject line of the email and as a heading in the body of the email. This block could also be used as a text message and as a heading in the paper letter. Doing this work helped us design the content and pattern for 1 block that could be used in 3 different places. We realised this block could also be used for other benefits with tiny tweaks: 1 content block with 42 uses.

With careful management, blocks could be created once and managed from one central place then published wherever we need them. In different channels, or in different benefit journeys. Reusing the same content where we can across all our benefits would give users a coherent experience.

It would also make creating and maintaining content more efficient. If we needed to update a chunk of content, like the opening hours sentence, we could do it once in the content repository and it would be automatically updated wherever it appears. A process that takes many months right now.

This way of working would reduce the risk of error, data breaches and noncompliance with the law. Content can be checked by legal and data governance colleagues, then locked down so it can’t be changed without a well governed process.

Stepping into the future together

Our journey to making communication better for clients is just starting. We are learning more about what works for clients, how to do it and all the different teams and capabilities involved. To make this successful we need everyone involved in designing and delivering our services to come together around this vision and to work with us to build a better experience. Your decisions when designing, improving and delivering our services will make this possible. Could your team be working on something that helps us work towards an omnichannel experience for our clients?

Email us at contentdesign@socialsecurity.gov.scot to get in touch.

Tags: content design, digital public services, scottish government, user centred design

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