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ITEM EX9 - ANNEX B

EXECUTIVE – 7 DECEMBER 2004

CUSTOMER SERVICE STRATEGY

1. In 21^st century Britain people live busy and complex lives. They expect to be able to shop, bank, and communicate 7 days a week and 24 hours each day. Time is precious; therefore customer service has to be excellent and increasingly needs to be tailored to the requirements of the individual. The private sector is responding to these demands and similar levels of service are expected from the public sector. Organisations that fail to keep pace with customer demands are unlikely to survive.
2. The County Council has recognized the need to focus on customer service improvement and in 2003 ‘Raising Our Performance 2’ was adopted with a central message:

"We will become an outstanding authority – one that provides an excellent service to the people and communities of Oxfordshire."

3. The Government is also urging customer service changes within the public sector, most notably through its ‘implementing electronic government (IEG) requirements.

Customer Service Requirements

4. Our aim is to ensure that ‘all our customers are able to easily access the services they need and receive courteous, prompt, well informed attention and assistance’.
5. To achieve this goal we will need to:

• Encourage a ‘One Council’ approach with all staff working to ensure that professional and service priorities are geared to the needs of communities and customers
• Improve access to services for contacts made in person, on the telephone or via the Internet.
• Improve the quality of the customer service response i.e. the ease with which customers are able to gather information and/or carry out a transaction.
• Work with other public service agencies to join up service delivery and the customer interface.
• Be prepared to reorganise operational processes to satisfy changing needs and aspirations.
• Deploy resources flexibly and use IT to streamline services.
• Be more responsive to local concerns and needs through better consultative processes, recognition of diversity and stronger local area working

6. Within services action is ongoing to improve our responsiveness to the community and individual customers. However collectively we also need to focus on four key areas:

• Information management
• Access
• Staff skills
• Our corporate standards for customer service

7. Information Management - In order to respond to customer requests effectively, we need good information, which is available in the right places. At the moment we are working to modernise our systems and develop new ones, but too much knowledge is still ‘held in the head’. We need to intensify our efforts to exploit the potential of IT to hold and manipulate information to suit a variety of uses. This will need to be supported by an authority wide information search engine, to help ‘customer service contacts’ to deal with up to 80% of the initial contacts made with the County Council.
8. Access - People contact the Council by the telephone, the internet and by personal visits. We need to improve our responsiveness in each of these areas. The most common form of contact is by telephone so we will need to give priority to customer service in this area. In essence this will mean:

• Improving information management so that customer service staff are provided with online guidance for dealing with frequently asked questions. A comprehensive set of Frequently Asked Questions and an A-Z of Services will be available to Internet users and a parallel set will be developed for use on the Intranet by staff responding to customer enquiries.
• Extended opening hours. Over the medium term when improved information systems have been developed, we need to extend our telephone service – possibly to 8am – 8pm Monday to Friday with 8am – 12 noon on weekends.

9. Use of the internet is also rapidly increasing but we need to develop the Council’s website to improve navigation and create opportunities for people to transact business online (pay bills, apply for grants etc). We will also use the Internet to allow people to access helplines (for example parents wanting to find out about school admission processes.)
10. Although we have hundreds of establishments across the county and thousands of staff working in local communities, the public regard the County Council as remote and difficult to contact. Our Property Strategy will lead to a rationalisation of council buildings but we may also need to provide dedicated local access points /one stop shops in market towns. Ideally these should be joint access points shared with district councils, the NHS, Police and others. It is suggested that we should pilot local access points starting with collaboration with West Oxfordshire‘s One Stop Shop in Witney. Initially we propose to focus on questions relating to issues covered by our Environment and Economy Directorate. If successful it is hoped that other district councils will work with us to extend this approach to other market towns
11. Staff Skills – To ensure that all members of staff are fully involved with our ‘improving customer service agenda’ we recognise the importance of them being fully trained to offer the best possible service. There are many elements to this but initially the intention is to concentrate on recruiting staff with good customer service skills and on ensuring that staff who are heavily involved in customer contact have the necessary training and development to fulfil these roles effectively.
12. We anticipate that a programme of customer care training will be developed for all customer facing staff; this may include elements of e-learning.
13. Customer Service Standards - We need to define our commitments to our customers. At a corporate level we will define standards for:

• Opening hours
• Arrangements for responding to telephone calls, emails and letters
• Arrangements for handling complaints

14. We will also establish clear standards for all services (for example recruitment processes.) These will be developed as part of the service planning process for 2005/06.

Longer Term Implications

15. If we are to be successful in improving customer service we need to recognise that it will change the way the organisation functions and is structured. Ten years from now we are likely to have a clearly defined ‘front office’ which deals with the bulk of the incoming calls, online messages and personal visits by customers. This will free the ‘back office’ to concentrate on high level professional tasks. It remains to be seen whether the "front office" becomes a corporate Contact Centre team perhaps operating from a remote location or whether the service will remain distributed within each directorate. If local access points prove popular it may be that mini contact centres will be developed as part of a network of local access points in market towns.
16. Decisions about the long term do not need to be made now. Over the next few years we need to take a pragmatic approach making progress at a pace the organisation can support but keeping options open for more radical changes in the future. No doubt we will change our thinking as we progress and we find that some changes work better than others or that new developments open up new opportunities.
17. Regardless of the conclusions we reach about longer term organizational arrangements, we will need to develop an Authority Wide Information Search Engine, a Customer Relationship Management system and an Electronic Telephone Directory in order to support improved customer service. The resource requirements and programming of these key ICT projects will be considered as part of the Council’s wider ICT programme, which will be evaluated through the Autumn 2004.

Conclusions

18. This Customer Service Strategy is an integral part of the Council’s improvement programme for the period to 2005, but action is likely to be needed over the next 5 – 10 years if the Council is to achieve sustainable change that has real benefits for our customers.
19. Big bang solutions have been resisted because of the costs, uncertainty about the desirability of some solutions and the difficulty of managing further initiatives alongside current commitments. In the short term (the next 18 months) there is much the Council can do to improve customer service within existing resources and we will be opportunistic in making progress where circumstances are favourable. This may mean that some service areas will progress more rapidly than others but it will allow us to learn from the experience gained in the pilot areas and thereby maximize the potential for successful progress. An action plan is attached at Annex 2 (download as .doc file).
20. The experience over the next 12 – 18 months will enable the Council to plot its next steps with more certainty about what works in Oxfordshire.
    
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