Customer experience
"Putting our customers at the heart of what we do and ensuring that our employees are clear and fair when communicating with customers."
Objective 1: Developing employees to provide good quality customer services
From our research with employees, at the moment customer service is seen as the responsibility of our dedicated customer service centre. Over the next three years we will make sure that providing good customer services is everybody's responsibility. This includes:
- using appropriate language when communicating
- being transparent and open about our timelines for service delivery
- being transparent and open about our decision making process
We will develop and support our staff to further improve how we deliver customer services to ensure that we provide a consistently good customer experience. This will include the creation of a customer charter that sets a standard for how all our employees engage:
- in a fair, polite and compassionate way
- using clear and straightforward language
We will apply our principles and charter even when we are not communicating with a customer directly. By providing information in a clear format and timely manner to other teams that engage with customers, we are working as One Council to be transparent and effective in our delivery of customer services.
Objective 2: Reviewing how we deliver services from end to end in order to make it as quick and easy as possible to get to the right outcome
We will work with each other and with partners to help deliver joined-up services based around customer need. A customer's experience with us often involves multiple teams, including:
- our customer service centre
- our back office teams
- our front-line services
- partner organisations
Meeting a customer's need may involve multiple systems and cross-over multiple business processes.
We will dedicate effort and attention to evaluate how we deliver services. We will make sure they are aligned around the needs of the customer rather than the needs of individual teams or systems. In our communications we will use clear language to help our customers understand:
- what services they are eligible for
- how to access them in the most convenient way
Objective 3: Enhancing our digital solutions to enable self-service and more resources to be directed to those who need our help the most
Our research with customers tells us that people often contact us by phone or email because they struggle to find what they need on our website. As part of delivering upon our digital strategy we will make digital the channel of choice, so that anyone that wants to engage with us digitally can do so confidently. We will do this by designing services in a way which:
- is mobile-friendly
- utilises modern technology
- is underpinned by joined-up support processes
This will help the majority of our customers communicate with us at a time that best suits them, without being constrained to the opening hours of our customer service centre.
Self-serve options:
- reduce the cost of service delivery
- allow us to spend more time and resource working with customer that need our support
Our digital solutions will also enable our teams to be more effective in managing and responding to customer requirements in a consistent way.