Customer strategy

"Ensuring a strong customer voice across the organisation, working with customers to improve the way that we do things.”

Objective 1: Creation of customer advocates to embed the voice of the customer in all that we do

We aim to complement the knowledge and professionalism of our employees with customer input. We will do this by creating a group of customer advocates who:

• are passionate about local services
• can help us as we design new processes, policies and strategies

We already engage with our customers regularly to understand their views and to refine our service delivery. By adopting the principles of our community strategy we are looking to further improve our engagement processes and approach. We will be implementing a new engagement platform that will enable us to be at the forefront of engagement and dialogue within Local Government.

Through this customer strategy we will go beyond our statutory obligations to hear what customers say. Our customer advocates will engage and consult on the way we design and deliver services to make sure they meet customer’s needs and expectations. This will ensure that our processes are designed to deliver a great customer experience. We will consult with customer advocates on how we can work with our partners and our suppliers to help customers access a range of public and third sector services in the way that best suits their needs. We will make sure our customer advocates are representative of the communities we serve, so that a broad range of views and different access needs are considered.

Objective 2: Work with customers to test and refine our processes and procedures

Our customer advocate group will work beyond initial design and implementation. In line with our aspiration to be digital by design, we will work in an iterative way in how we build and implement new processes. We will work with customers to develop, build, test and improve solutions. This will give customers the opportunity to tell us what matters the most to them and identify where enhancements could further improve the customer experience.

Objective 3: A focus on feedback – we don’t wait to be told – we’re actively finding out what people think and we’re seen to respond

We will work proactively with our customers, their advocates and our teams to understand how things are going. We will dedicate attention and effort to resolve problems before they become major issues. To deliver a good customer experience we must consistently improve the quality of the service over time, responding to feedback and data to find better ways of doing things. To do this we will improve the feedback loop between our different teams so that insight we get from customers is triangulated with data on how services are being used, to inform how we work.

After making changes, we will go back to the data to:

• check that the improvements have had a positive impact
• look for opportunities to enhance our offer in collaboration with our customer advocates, our colleagues and our partners