I’m delighted to be able to share our new business plan, which sets out our strategic objectives for the current financial year. While the 6 objectives are equally important and interlinked, in this blog post I want to focus on the work we’re doing to improve our customer experience.
We know there's been a significant amount of change for our millions of customers, and we've been working hard to listen to feedback and improve our services based on this.
This is about more than just scoring well for customer satisfaction, meeting our public targets for service availability, or minimising call waiting times. It’s about making seamless, customer-focused services part of our organisational DNA, making sure we have a deep understanding of what it’s like to use our services.
Improving the customer experience
Companies House is dedicated to providing outstanding and efficient services to all our customers and users. Over the next 12 months, we will invest in digital enhancements and look for practical ways to minimise burdens on legitimate businesses.
That means making specific improvements to services to simplify the customer experience. For instance:
- improving our filing service through increased automation to make it easier to submit information
- expanding the use of digital channels to keep in touch with customers
- enabling users to search the register in more depth
We’ll also improve how we measure customer experience to get a deeper understanding of what people need from our services and our data. Insights from this enhanced user research will shape future improvements that also help increase the value of our data to users.
Better support and guidance
We know that companies come in all shapes and sizes, with different needs and expectations. To help directors and other customers meet their responsibilities, we will improve our support and guidance, working in collaboration with HMRC and The Insolvency Service.
We'll also continue to expand our digital services and reduce the need to file documents on paper. Our online services have built-in checks to help you avoid errors and rejections. Expanding our digital offering will:
- lower costs for our customers
- speed up our filing processes
- reduce rejections
- help us make sure the register is updated more quickly
Embedding reforms
We are delivering the most significant company law reforms in over a century, making Companies House a more active gatekeeper of corporate information. We want to make it as simple as possible for people to run legitimate businesses, while stopping bad actors misusing company structures.
We’re committed to understanding the impact of change as we implement the reforms set out in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act. We will use best practice to evaluate the effect on customers, learning from the experience of our identity verification rollout.
We are carrying out large-scale and in-depth research to put evidence and the customer experience front and centre of our service design and implementation.
Modernising our technology
We also know our technical infrastructure needs to be modernised, so that our systems match our ambition for an excellent customer experience.
Over the coming years, we will take a phased approach to improving our underlying technology to boost performance, reduce risk, and make sure we can work effectively with government partners for the benefit of our customers.
The work we do over the next year and through to 2030 will mean Companies House continues to play a vital role in strengthening trust in the UK business environment and supporting economic growth.
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