Agenda item

Cllr Neil Fawcett, Cabinet Member for Community and Corporate Services, Emily Schofield, Head of Strategy, Richard Merritt, Customer Service Centre Service Delivery, and Susmita Dave, National Management Trainee, have been invited to present a report on the draft Customer Experience Strategy prior to its later consideration at Cabinet in April.  

The Committee is asked to consider the report and to AGREE any recommendations it wishes to make to Cabinet arising therefrom.

Cllr Fawcett, Cabinet Member for Community and Corporate Services, introduced the draft strategy as the Council’s means to level up the approach to customer service when interacting with residents via the Council’s many services across the county. It intended to learn from and build on those areas providing good service in order to drive improvements and provide a consistently good level of service across the entire Council. An area of particular strength was the level of satisfaction recorded by those using the Customer Service Centre. Less successful with the public was the Council’s Fix My Street platform. Investment in the training and development of staff would be key.

Susmita Dave, National Management Trainee, provided further detail. The draft strategy was intended to be run over a three-year period with the express vision of ‘put[ting] the customer at the heart of our service delivery’. The need for such a strategy was driven by multiple factors. New groups of people were interacting with the Council owing to technological development, which had also raised expectations of how frictionless interactions with an organisation should be; there was a need to assure customers that standards of service existed; more positive interactions with the public would underpin the morale of staff. Feedback from the Residents’ Survey, budget consultation and other sources indicated that in some areas trust with residents had been dented. Tackling this successfully would rely both on political support and officer prioritisation.

The Strategy sought to use national data, resident survey information and mapping of customer data, profiles and interactions against customer service levels to focus on making the greatest difference.

The four key pillars of the Strategy focused on the following: 1) Embedding a customer ethos within the Council’s culture 2) Developing a better understanding of the Council’s customers and what they want, 3) Optimising access to customer services, particularly through new technology, whilst protecting the access of those for whom such technology would prove a barrier, and 4) Designing an excellent end to end customer experience so that more complex cases - drawing on input from multiple areas of the Council -could receive the same high standard of service as simpler interactions.

An important element of the Strategy was that it should be flexible to respond to new data.  The Council intended to encourage feedback from its staff, service users as well as continuing to reference and engage with information gleaned from local and national data-sets.

The Committee raised the following queries following the presentation:

·       Why had it taken so long for a customer service strategy to be formulated given the risks laid out in the strategy were so urgent? The important aspect of this strategy was that customer service was a big focus of the new Chief Executive Officer. It was important that every customer was dealt with efficiently and in a manner matching Council values. This was an opportunity to reflect and review the Customer Service Charter, and to be more productive and collaborative in the future.

·       Was a fifth pillar required in the strategy for how customer complaints were dealt with and what that process involved? It was agreed that this did require more focus as an important part of the customer experience with the Council. There was a lot to be learnt from customer dissatisfaction in this area, as it was an area where it was important to get right first time. This would be made more visible to the public and organisation.

·       Whether any work had been done with District and City colleagues to ensure there was the same sort of customer service there as with the County Council. The Town Parish Charter was highlighted as a to show the work being done to work closely with Councils around Oxfordshire together online.

The Committee AGREED to make recommendations on the following themes:

·       Include subcontractors as part of our standards.

·       Customers are not the same as collectively paid for services and do we need corporate view on how we refer to residents.

·       To align the strategy more closely with management of and prevention of complaints.

·       Work with district and city councils concerning a complaints and issues handling mechanism.

·       To include more socio-economic groups, including those for whom English is a second language to consulting lists.