Agent Forum (AF)

As at the end of January 2020, the Forum had over 658 (up 48 on December) registered Agent subscribers, of 1,229 users signed up to the old forum. The Agent Forum re-platforming has been live for four months now and even though registrations have not reached the levels of its predecessor, participation and issues traffic have increased. Thus far during 2019/20, we have dealt with over 500 issues, across all Heads of Duty. The new ‘Knowledge Base’ feature is also increasingly popular and carries announcements and real-time tax information and supported a Self-Assessment 2018/19 EoY filing programme. In conjunction with our Issues Overview Group (IOG) stakeholder colleagues, we have developed procedures to identify high-priority widespread issues to be taken forward for resolution with our internal technical specialist and communications partners. This will be implemented on the Agent Forum going into 2020. We are building our internal HMRC Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) capability, formalising recruitment from across HMRC to improve the quality and timeliness of issue resolution responses and to focus on Agent Forum operations. Performance metrics carried forward from the previous platforms include over 165,000 views, 7,200 posted messages on over 1,500 current topics, all since July 2017; which are moderated daily with appropriate responses given, as determined by subject matter, related traffic generated, and referrals provided by line of business. In developing the new service, we will review what performance metrics are reported in future, as we better understand new functionality provided by the MS Dynamics platform.

The Digital Customer Support Services (DCSS) Agent Team is staffed by a Service Manager and 2.5 FTE Issues Resolution Managers (IRMs), who moderate and run the forum.”