Agenda item

Presentation by Head of People, Projects and Performance

The Head of People, Projects and Performance, Sue Griffiths updated the PDG following the last meeting of the Group.  She referred to good customer service and what this meant to people. Managers within the authority had been asked what they saw as good customer service in their everyday lives.  Responses included having a “relationship” with the organisations, being listened to by someone who seemed to care, promises being kept, a choice of methods either phone or online query.  Research into the quality of current customer service was undertaken which included mystery shopping and online transactions.  A customer access strategy would be created in line with the findings, best practice and these would be linked with South Kesteven’s other initiatives. 

The Head of People, Projects and Performance then highlighted the current contact through Customer Services which was as follows:

•        Telephone calls to CSC = 47894 (2011/12)

•        Emails handled by CSC = 4620 (2011/12)

•        Face to face customers = 26357 (2011/12)

–       Grantham 54% (14235)

–       Bourne 24% (6427)

–       Deeping 9% (2348)

–       Stamford 13% (3347)

The face to face information reflects most contacts made in this way with the council. However customers phoning or emailing directly to services are not routinely counted by all services.

Members felt that voice mail should be used to the absolute minimum and that phones should not be left ringing.  The Head of People, Projects and Performance said that the use of “Hunt Groups” should be more widely used to enable a ringing telephone to be picked up by someone, even if they were not in that section so that a message could be taken.

The mystery shopping findings were helpful as they identified what worked well and what didn’t work so well.  Following this some quick wins were put in place to help give a better service to our customers and these included a reduced number of published telephone numbers, more resources being put in to web chat and commissioning customer focus training together with customer standards behaviours “putting ourselves in a customer’s shoes” All this information was also being used to help develop the Bourne Community Access Point.   

She then spoke about the direction of travel from the current position to what the customer access aspired to.  The proposed approach to reach this had the following key points:

•        Virtual customer service “centre” to help customers gain a resolution first time

•        Ability to see customer as a whole rather than by service

•        Capable customers/easy queries –electronic

•        Vulnerable customers/complex queries – phone or face to face

•        Seamless service for customers even on the most complex queries

•        Support improved approach with good quality training

•        Head of People, Performance and Projects to be the overall customer champion

•        Customer Service Manager will manage the customer standards element

•        Heads of Service will manage the technical/professional element

This approach would need to be done in deployment phases the first phase being to establish standards and consistency within the Council which could take between six to nine months.  The next phase was to consolidate and improve and could take about 18months to embed within the Council. The third phase was to lead and excel and offer services on behalf of other partners such as universal credit work.  An opportunity to do this was offered with the library service in the Bourne CAP project.

She then gave examples of customer journeys from those that can be done directly on line and therefore have no impact of customer services advisors to those that require someone to listen and care about what the customer is saying and have a direct impact on the customer services advisor.

The next steps were to use the strategy as a management tool and an improvement plan was being adopted. She then referred to work that was being done in exploring the use of a citizen’s panel to help with consultation and projects where customer insight was needed.  This panel would be made up of people who were more informed about how the council worked and therefore could provide information on how to make changes to improve services.

Various comments were then made about issues that Members had encountered to which the Head of People, Projects and Performance replied.

The Chairman thanked the Head of People, Projects and Performance for attending the meeting.