Advice Direct Scotland call for data and tech experts
Advice Direct Scotland is starting the New Year with a continued sense of purpose and ambition and the team are keen to engage with data experts and technology experts to help. This is a call for input and help that we’re pleased to support.
We don’t know what we don’t know, but we do know technology could help!
Advice Direct Scotland is a citizen centric organisation that serves Scotland’s population by offering practical help and advice across a huge range of issues.
We have over 700,000 contacts with citizens and consumers across the UK every year and the majority of these are with people in Scotland.
We are interested in using technology both to interpret the data we have, and to gain an understanding of the data we hold that is currently not used to measure impact and outcomes.
Our data resides in our Salesforce orgs. This data contains information from traditional telephone calls, web chat, social media, email, and online engagements. Data Lab is currently assisting us in interpreting the data, and to highlight areas where we may want to focus resources.
Areas of specific interest include:
- Creating an app linking debt/money with wellness. For example sharing improvements in income and expenditure on a regular basis to motivate individuals, but also linking people with local opportunities to improve, perhaps, their fitness, or access to activities for their children. This could also include local offers to save money, and top tips for improving financial management. We believe such an app could improve mental well-being and allow individuals and families to effectively plan their finances over time.
- Use technology to highlight those customers in particular financial stress before issues become unmanageable or adversely affect family life.
- Look at our engagement with personal data stores and see if they can either be improved or replaced.
- Further automate our debt/money journeys to encourage engagement and reduce our costs.
- Look at all of our data (including our general service, our consumer service, our debt service, and our energy services) and create a map highlighting where our services are in demand and where our impact is limited. This will allow us to focus resources on engaging with those audiences who have to date not sought advice and information from us.
We don't know what we don't know. We're always looking to increase our effectiveness and are keen to connect with technology companies and universities that can assist us in our role of connecting advice and information with the people who need it, and then utilising this data to drive policy and effect of outcomes both for the customer and for other stakeholders such as the Scottish government.
If you’re interested and happy to work with us to try and progress positive change for citizens we’d really like to hear from you. Please use Fintech Scotland contact us page if you're interested.
