The Passport Agency uses service design to stop infuriating customers.

In 1999, at least 500 holidays were cancelled due to a crisis at the UK Passport Agency. Applications were taking up to 50 days to process – they were supposed to take only five.

Panic-stricken travellers camped outside passport offices – the agency spent £16,000 on providing umbrellas for rain-lashed applicants – while around 3.5 million calls went unanswered.

The agency’s new computer system had produced 400,000 fewer passports than expected in its first nine months of operation, generating a backlog that ultimately cost the government £12.6m, including £161,000 in compensation to irate would-be holidaymakers.

Yet in 2006, for the third year running, the agency ranked first for overall customer satisfaction in the CompariSat surveys of public and private sector organisations, with a 97% approval rate. How did it achieve such a remarkable turnaround? By prioritising customer relations and thinking hard about service design.

“There was a big focus on systems redesign, but more importantly on restoring public confidence,” says Bernard Herdan, who took over as chief executive after the crisis. The first stage was understanding what went wrong. Crucially, the agency had underestimated the impact of the new computer system on productivity – for many staff it had meant a transition from paper to screen.

Demand for passports was high, partly due to the new requirement for children to have their own passports. Once the backlog began, the in-house phone service couldn’t handle the volume of calls. As people panicked, the crisis escalated. Britons with up to six months left on their passport joined the queue. “We didn’t have proper systems in place to communicate with our customers,” says Herdan. 

After consulting with customers, and studying best practice in Australia – generally recognised to have the best passport service in the world – the Passport Agency published a recovery plan.

To gain some immediate respite, calls were outsourced to a 24-hour centre and a user-friendly website and system for handling email enquiries was set up. Addressing the crux of the problem, the passport-issuing software was fine-tuned to make it more productive and a new computerised processing system installed. To cut waiting times, opening hours and appointment availability were increased; appointment-only counter services, premium and fast-track services were introduced to reduce queues. The agency then beefed up its project management systems and private-sector partnerships and strengthened its risk management and contingency planning.

Soon, the service was meeting its target of answering 90% of calls within 20 seconds. Application waiting times fell from a 51-day nadir in 1999 to a six-day average across 2003-06. Of 4.2 million calls in 2006-07, fewer than 1% were met with an engaged tone.

The agency’s next big task is to ensure it tackles identity fraud, that most 21st-century of crimes. With 47 million British passports in circulation, the UK is the world’s second biggest passport issuer behind the US. Today, 80% of Brits hold one – whereas fewer than one in four people had one in 1984. In 2006, the Passport Agency merged with the Home Office identity cards programme as the Identity and Passport Service (IPS). New measures have led to fee increases, concerns about civil liberties and, in some cases, longer waiting periods. With the introduction of biometric ‘ePassports’, with a secure chip that stores a scan of the holder’s photo, fees have risen by almost a third – to £66.

The next stage will be a passport holding fingerprints ,while all applicants’ details, including eye or facial scans, are now being stored on government databases. There are massive challenges ahead, but the service will be much better prepared for the worst-case scenario in future.

A brief history of the British passport

First ‘safe documents’ referenced in parliament.

Date of oldest surviving passport, signed by King Charles 1.

Standard, single-page documents issued solely to British nationals.

Passports become a single sheet folded into eight with a cardboard cover.

Passport Service develops and introduces ‘Old Blue’, a 32-page passport with firm cover.

Burgundy-coloured, machine-readable  passports issued, following a European Community-approved format.

Biometric ‘ePassports’, with a secure chip containing a scan of the holder’s photograph and signature, are introduced.

Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 4, Summer 2008