Encourage a shift to the digital channel

• Research with people who aren't using the digital service. Understand why customers might not want to use your service.
• Continue to iterate and improve.
• Tell customers about your digital service. Use non-digital channels to encourage digital take-up.
• Support the digital service with trained staff.

As we build simpler, clearer and faster government services the digital channel will become more convenient for users than non-digital channels like post, phone and shopfronts. Increased digital take-up will mean users can spend less time interacting with government. This will result in greater cost efficiencies for government.

Measuring digital take-up helps you to understand how well your service is being used.

We still need to help users who are unable to use digital channels and provide support to those who need it. But we want to ensure digital channels are used whenever possible and to scale back, or phase out, alternative channels when we can.

In Discovery and Alpha stages

Your user research will give you a good understanding of where people want to access your service and their levels of digital skill. Through the Discovery stage and Alpha stage you need to understand:

• the users journeys and how they interact with your service, digitally or otherwise
• existing alternative channels and how users currently interact with them
• what percentage of users access digital and non-digital channels
• how you will increase digital take-up and what targets you will set.

In Beta stage

As you continue developing your service and start testing it with users in Beta stage, you should:

• be increasing digital take-up; revising your targets and considering relevant performance metrics
• have a plan of how to move users to the digital channel where possible, including a communications plan to promote the service
• have agreed analytics/metrics for the volume of usage across channels
• understand the full impact of retiring any potentially redundant services and channels.

As you progress your service to launch stage you will need to show:

• how you've revised the targets you made in the Beta stage to increase the number of users (including users we need to assist) of your digital service
• what you've learned from testing different approaches to encourage users (including users we need to assist) to choose the digital service over non-digital alternatives, and which ones you'll use in the Live stage
• your retirement strategy for any redundant services and channels
• that your service load capacity is scalable to meet increased digital take-up
• how you will promote your service and encourage people to use it, including how your messaging will appear in places where the users will see it.

GOV.UK Service Manual Encouraging people to use your digital service