Return to AgendaITEM CG11
Corporate Governance Scrutiny Committee
–
Report from the Charter Mark Board on progress against recommendations of Scrutiny Review of
Customer Focus – July 2007
Following
the Scrutiny Review of Customer Focus during 2006 a number of advances have
been made, both directly as a result of the review and as a natural progression
in the development of customer service through the Customer Service strategy
and Charter Mark programme. A significant step in
joining together customer feedback and resultant activity has been the move to
draw together the customer service function with that of consultation and
marketing under the banner of Customer First, which reflects where we are
putting customers in our thinking and activity.
The
review highlighted specific areas that were considered to be central in
increasing the organisation’s ability to understand
and react appropriately to customers needs and, where possible, wishes. These
broadly fell into five areas – namely:
Staff Training
The
review called for customer service training to be available not only for new
staff members in induction but also throughout the period of employment with
the County Council.
A
comprehensive series of training packages ranging from induction to NVQ through
to tailored and service-specific was developed and delivered by the Customer
Service team and the Adult Learning Service to more than 3000 staff during
2005-2006. Some of these packages will continue to be delivered through our
Learning and Development team in Shared Services as part of the development of
a series of core competencies, which includes customer service, to form the
basis of a package available to all. One of the designated management
competencies is ‘customer focus’ and courses are being commissioned
specifically to develop skills in this area.
The Customer Service
team, which is now part of Customer First, continues to work with staff across
the authority to identify areas of customer interaction that require support.
Recently this has focussed on making best use of
customer feedback and establishing appropriate ways of capturing the information
contained within complaints, comments and compliments to inform service
planning. Staff will further develop this by asking them, through the
suggestion scheme, to directly feed in their ideas on how to respond and react
to specific issues raised by customers.
Courses
and workshops are open to all and members of staff from different tiers of the organisation have taken advantage of them. It is clear that
many team leaders and Heads of Service are actively working to improve customer
service in line with the requirements of Charter Mark and are requesting and
attending suitable workshops.
Service Standards
It is
now recognised throughout the authority that we have
customer service standards, which are tested through mystery shopping. This has
been successful in raising awareness, although necessarily limited by the
resources available. Following each wave of the mystery shopping which is
conducted six- monthly, the results have been analysed and fed back to a range of audiences including CCMT, management teams, customer
service boards and First Link forum and remedies put in place where necessary
to target areas of weakness. Examples of excellence have also been high lighted
and individual members of staff praised for exemplary responses.
As part
of the preparation for Charter Mark many services have drawn up charters or
service level agreements, usually in consultation with staff and customers to
demonstrate what can be expected from them. This may exceed the Corporate
Standards and a variety of methods is used by individual services to assess
their performance against them.
Customer Feedback – and our response
to it.
This is
the area in which we can never do enough. To truly become a listening and
responsive organisation is a standard met by very few
and one to which we continue to aspire.
As noted
previously we already carry out simulations of customer experiences through our
mystery-shopping programme. These have developed as
the programme has continued; however we still need to
go much further in seeing ourselves as our customers see us. We anticipate
creating a closer connection between the intelligence gathered through our
public consultation with what happens at the point of both planning and
delivering our services by the introduction of the concept of ‘Ask
Oxfordshire’.
‘Ask
Oxfordshire’ will have its foundation in the Customer
First team as a centre for analysing:
It is clear that most of our customer feedback will go straight to
services as a direct result of how and what they deliver. However, ‘Ask
Oxfordshire’ will set corporate standards and guidelines for how we
take best practice and make it the Oxfordshire way of doing business or serving
our customers.
Once ‘Ask Oxfordshire’ is fully operational we will be discussing
with customers through our Citizens’ Panel how they would prefer to receive
information relating to our response to their needs.
Availability of accurate information
The
review recognised that we need to
ensure that all our major information sources and systems are
well–linked and neither duplicate nor mis-match.
Work is being carried out to link our data
handling across all our systems and also to look at what information is most
frequently required to answer customer enquiries. Within this area we must be
aware of what we can do better in working with partners, particularly the
District and City councils.
The
first stage of upgrading our information is the radical overhaul of our staff
directory. The newly designed directory will allow staff to find the most
appropriate person to answer enquiries .It will offer further benefits, by
allowing entries which will significantly expand on the information which is
currently available; allowing space for information about current work
responsibilities, physical location, other skills and potentially social space
to list outside interests - thereby developing informal staff networks.
Accountability and Responsibility
The
review sought to ensure that responsibility for customer focus is owned within
directorates.
The
Charter Mark programme across the authority touches
on all employees but, to ensure its success, services have had to identify key
individuals to give leadership to their aspect of the programme.
It is proposed that once our ambition to become a Charter Mark authority has
been achieved, the Customer Service boards will take on a role related to the
aims of ‘Ask Oxfordshire’ – namely to ensure that our understanding of
customers’ requirements are translated through our service planning into
delivery and improved customer experience – making good use of the Charter Mark
principles, which will have been absorbed into the functional aspects of each
service.
Conclusion
In
conclusion this report demonstrates that key aspects of the recommendations of
the scrutiny review have been captured within the dynamic programme of work to move the County Council to becoming a Charter Mark authority, whilst
acknowledging that there is still much to be done.
The
significance of linking consultation and feedback directly to our customer
service improvement programme tangibly demonstrates
recognition that we are putting in place the foundations for the organisation our customers require us to become.
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