Agenda item

Presentation by the Interim Service Manager Customer Services

(Copy presentation enclosed)

The Interim Customer Services Service Manager, Lee Sirdifield gave a presentation to the Group on the Customer Access Strategy.  He referred to previous presentations to the Group on the topic and how it was being developed.

The presentation included broad principles such as how we will behave with our customers and keeping service delivery consistent across all mediums regardless of how the customer accessed the Council’s services. Putting ourselves in the customer’s shoes and resolving customer’s queries in the quickest way possible at the point of contact. Having a single view of the customer with all relevant information to hand so that we are better placed to respond, learn and understand their issues and apologies if things go wrong.

A short discussion then followed with Members asking questions about the single view, how we respond to our customers and unique reference numbers to which both Lee Sirdifield and the Portfolio Holder for Governance and Communication responded.

Mr Sirdifield then spoke about the key outcomes which included customers influencing how services were delivered.   The need to have clear and consistent standards of access to council services. An effective website was required with end to end functionality and service requests with “digital by preference” being the preferred option between the council and its customers, although support for vulnerable and complex issues still needed to be available as required. A comment was made about Apps to which Mr Sirdifield replied that there were a range on line and these were being looked into. 

Generally 83% of households had access to the internet with 73% accessing the facility daily.   Many organisations were digital by default with more automated telephony growing such as voice recognition.  The use of technology had grown dramatically and was changing the way services were delivered.

Mr Sirdifield then spoke about the Citizen’s Panel and how it interacted with us. He then highlighted areas within the Council’s technology that needed to be reviewed including the Council’s core systems and the different telephony across the organisation which was perhaps not being used to maximise deployment.  Consultants had been appointed to do a short piece of work to help scope an action plan, including the Council’s direction of travel.

He concluded the presentation by listing how the council would measure its success which included regularly surveying customers within the Customer Service Centre, (CSC) a more consistent telephony offer using “friendly” technology and on line functionality needed to improve to cover 75% of services.

The strategy would be going to Cabinet in January to be adopted and then it would be communicated to staff.  The existing offers would be marketed to residents and the required IT and resources would be identified together with a detailed action plan put in place to support the strategy which would include communication of the Council’s approach to our customers.

One Member then gave an example where she felt that she was not getting a very good response when trying to pinpoint locations of fly tipping she preferred a direct route to contract services.  Mr Sirdifield responded that each customer service advisor did have access to a mapping system which could pin point locations; also there was an app now available which required you to take a photpgraph which could pin point exact locations using GPS.    Additional improvements had been made both in the CSC and on the web page so better solutions were in place for reporting problems such as fly tipping.

The Portfolio Holder stressed that first points of contact were not oracles and that a list of telephone numbers of officers had been circulated to Members.  A question was asked about fly tipping on land that did not belong to the Council.  The Head of Legal and Democratic Services stated that fly tipping would be removed unless it was on private land.

The Chairman thanked Mr Sirdifield for his presentation.