St Albans Delivers An Accessible and Fluid Customer Journey With Monsido

Back to customers

Adam Staples is a Customer Delivery Manager with St Albans City & Council in the United Kingdom (UK). In his role, he is responsible for maintaining both the website and external web portal, which involves ensuring that they are up-to-date and accessible for all visitors at all transactional points throughout their journey.

Adam manages a team of 50 web editors working in specific service areas. As these editors have other core job responsibilities, web editing accounts for only a small part of their jobs.

According to Adam, Monsido’s highly visual and user-friendly platform has made it significantly easier for them to ‘do things on the fly’, meaning a lot more work on the website actually gets done.

Problem: Ensuring their website is accessible for all potential visitors

St Albans’ main focus has been on ensuring an accessible and fluid website experience for all of their visitors.

A big issue St Albans consistently had with previous web governance applications was that they would force their editors to log in and out every time they wanted to make a simple change or check something on their website – a laborious process which resulted in a lower level of overall productivity.

As a busy team of editors with other priorities to attend to, they simply did not have the time to shuffle between different systems, meaning that many website tasks would just fall by the wayside.

Solution:

Monsido’s industry-leading platform has made it easier for St Albans’ to meet accessibility standards and deliver a fluid and enjoyable website experience for all visitors. In fact, since adopting the Monsido platform their website’s accessibility score has risen from 68.68% to a healthier 69.82%.

The Monsido platform has proven to be a particularly good fit for St Albans’ work style and workflow, as it allows their editors, who often have limited time and competing priorities, to take care of website issues in a manner that does not disrupt the course of their day-to-day work.

Why Monsido?

St Albans City & Council service a wide variety of customers with a variety of different accessibility needs. As a public body, they are governed by public legislation, and therefore have a duty to keep up-to-date with the very latest legal requirements.

Since they have started using the Monsido platform, they have noticed a marked improvement in their ability to remain in compliance with relevant accessibility standards and ensure an effortless and enjoyable website experience for all their customers.

As the accessibility standards that St Albans are duty bound to adhere to are constantly changing and shifting, Monsido has been hugely helpful in keeping Adam and his team alerted to relevant changes in legislation and associated accessibility standards as and when they happen.

As a public organization, another important concern for St Albans was that they remain compliant with GDPR and ensure that their website contains no personal information. Monsido’s Data Privacy module allowed their web editors to stay ahead of the legal curve by ensuring no private visitor information appeared anywhere on their website.

The Key Challenges Monsido Solved for St Albans:

Ensure high content quality and a fluid user experience by allowing them to work through their user journeys in order to pinpoint areas of improvement and see if there are any bumps along the road.
Analyze their users behavior using Monsido Heatmaps to identify key engagement and disengagement points, particularly when it comes to important transactions.
Ensure an appropriate level of readability. As the average St Albans resident has a year 8 reading level, it is vital that the language they use is easy to understand and engage with.
Eliminate spelling mistakes and broken links that can derail an otherwise fluid website or web portal experience.
Improve their self-service with Monsido's accessible services and templates setup.
Ensure that unique words and spellings are detected across all pages. For example, St Albans have created a policy to ensure that that ‘St Albans’ is always presented as a single word.
Check spellings are correct for often used keywords, such as the name of their own organization, for example.
Ensure mobile accessibility. The ability to check web pages for mobile accessibility is a top priority for St Albans, as mobile visitors account for an ever increasing amount of their website traffic.
Save time with the Statistics module, which has completely eliminated the need to run endless reports in order to check on key metrics like number of page visits, time spent on a page, bounce rates etc. With other tools it would take a lot of time just to get this information together – with Monsido it is all right there at hand.