Assistance services

Annex III to the SDG Regulation defines cross-border assistance services where citizens and businesses can ask questions or present issues concerning their rights, obligations, single market rules or procedures.  The authorities responsible for assistance services must provide assistance in their subject area in accordance with the SDG Regulation and other EU regulations (e.g. the Professional Qualifications Directive). In addition, the SDG Regulation obliges assistance services to produce information on them via the Your Europe portal and to collect information on visits to the assistance services’ web pages, their customer cases, and the quality of the service provided.

Request feedback and collect statistics

Member States must collect anonymous visitor information on visits to the web pages in the Your Europe link register.

Member States must collect the following information about visited web pages:

  • URL
  • Number of visitors
  • Visitor’s country
  • Type of device used by the visitor

However, no data that can identify the user is collected, and no statistics are compiled on the user.

The KEHA Centre provides Finnish authorities with the Matomo tool, which has embeddable code that facilitates the collection of visitor statistics cost-efficiently. The tool first collects the data on the KEHA Centre’s Mylly data platform, which sends it on to the European Commission in a centralised way.

Contact the Digital Single Market team for a Matomo embed code. If any web pages you have previously entered in the link register use the KEHA Centre's Matomo embed code, you can also use it on new pages.

Your organisation can also use its own tools to compile statistics on visits to the pages. In this case, your organisation is also responsible for submitting the statistics to the EU Commission. Read more about compiling statistics on visits and submitting them to the Commission.

The following information must be collected for each customer case in the assistance service:

  • Number of assistance requests
  • Member State of customers
  • Target group (citizen or business)
  • Topic of assistance
  • Response time of assistance

The information can be collected directly in the Your Europe portal’s user interface for authorities or in an Excel table that must be uploaded to the user interface twice a year (by 31 August and 28 February).

The collection and reporting of information on customer cases applies to a request for advice made using an online form, email or any other means of communication. If the assistance service decides that statistical data cannot be collected from telephone conversations, chats or assistance visits, the Commission must be notified.

Customers of assistance services must be offered the opportunity to give feedback on the quality of the service. The Commission's quality feedback tool must be used to collect feedback. A link to the tool must be sent either during the provision of the service or after it has ended. The feedback tool asks customers to give the service a star rating and offers them the opportunity to give open-ended feedback for future development. The feedback for future development is only visible to the assistance service's designated users in the Your Europe user interface for authorities.

In order for the feedback to be allocated to the right assistance service, the feedback link https://foq.youreurope.europa.eu/assist-service/?lang=en&id= must contain the assistance service's ID number (e.g. for the Enterprise Finland assistance service, it is 022af480-5647-4f34-ba3e-d8346bc9fc51). The link must also contain a language code (fi, sv, en), which determines the language of the feedback form shown to the user. You can find the ID number of your assistance service from the service information in the Your Europe user interface for authorities.

All web pages registered with Your Europe must have a link to the quality feedback tool provided by the European Commission. The feedback tool allows the user to give the page a star rating and enter feedback on whether they found the information they needed or whether their visit was successful. In addition, the user can give feedback in words.

Feedback can be collected on four different feedback forms concerning either the content of the page or the e-service. If the page contains information on both a procedure and an e-service, information on the content of the page must be collected on the page. To ensure that the feedback is allocated to the correct web page, snippets must also be added to the web page's source code.

See the Commission’s guidance on the placement of the link to the Feedback Tool on the web pages.

See the Commission’s guidance for more detailed technical instructions on the use of the feedback tool.

Feedback form on website content with an open question

  • https://europa.eu/youreurope/information-service-feedback/index_en.htm
  • Snippet <a target="_blank" href="https://europa.eu/youreurope/information-servicefeedback/index_en.htm">Information services survey</a>

Feedback form on website content without an open question

  • https://europa.eu/youreurope/information-service-feedback/index_en.htm?ft=no
  • Snippet <a target="_blank" href="https://europa.eu/youreurope/information-servicefeedback/index_en.htm?ft=no">Information services survey</a>

Feedback form on e-services with an open question

  • https://europa.eu/youreurope/online-procedure-feedback/index_en.htm
  • Snippet <a target="_blank" href="https://europa.eu/youreurope/online-procedure-feedback/index_en.htm”>Online procedures survey</a>

Feedback form on e-services without an open question

  • https://europa.eu/youreurope/online-procedure-feedback/index_en.htm?ft=no
  • Snippet <a target="_blank" href="https://europa.eu/youreurope/online-procedure-feedback/index_en.htm?ft=no”>Online procedures survey</a>

The language of the form link in the feedback tool must be changed by editing the language code in the URL (index_en/fi/sv) according to the language of the page for which feedback is requested. In addition, the language code must be the same in the source code snippet on the website as in the feedback tool link.