Agenda and minutes

There were no declarations of interest.

The minutes of the meeting held on 12 July 2017 were signed as a true record.  There were no matters arising.

Briefing Note of the Deputy Chief Executive (People)

The Board considered a briefing note which provided an update on Customer Services including feedback from the latest customer satisfaction survey and action plan.

The Customer Journey Programme had been introduced to bring together all customer facing activity into one service area.  All customer contact had been moved into Customer Services.

The changes included:

·  Aligning opening hours

·  Improving customer correspondence

·  New booking system

·  Triage function to answer simple enquiries

·  New phone platform

·  Meet and greet function

·  Improved physical environment

The briefing note set out the City Council’s focus on electronic means of communicating and transacting with the organisation for example: kiosks for payments, an online payments system and continued development of the customer account facility.  This had led to an increase in self-service from less than 1% to 28%.

Customer feedback had had been gathered during the first two weeks of opening, after 3 months of operation and at the 1 year anniversary of opening.  The latest feedback had indicated an 87% positive response.  The highest levels of satisfaction were for excellent service and friendly staff, there had been a slight decrease around waiting times.  The results of the customer satisfaction survey were set out in Appendix 2 of the briefing note and showed that although positive overall, they did present themes to focus improvement activity – for telephones the priority remained improving call wait times and for face to face, the primary focus was on investigating increased kiosk availability.

The Board questioned officers on aspects of the briefing note and the action plan including seeking to understand the volume of people accessing customer services and how the trend had changed over time.  It was agreed that this data be gathered and circulated to the Board for their information.

The Board also discussed their perception of the service either arising from members making ‘mystery customer’ calls to the customer services help desk or from comments made to them by constituents.  Common themes were that customers were not clear where the Customer Service Centre was in Broadgate and the length of time taken for telephone calls to be answered. 

The Board noted the content of the Briefing Note and Action Plan and requested that officers explore the possibility of making improvements to the signage to the Customer Services Centre in Broadgate and investigate ways of advising telephone callers how long they may need to wait before their call is answered.

Briefing Note of the Deputy Chief Executive (Place)

The Board noted a briefing note in respect of the 2017/18 Capital Programme including an analysis of:

·  Outturn expenditure for 2016/17

·  Quarter 1 estimate of expenditure for 2017/18

·  Budgeted estimate for expenditure over the following 4 years 2018/19 to 2021/22

·  An indication of the funding mix for individual schemes

·  A brief description of each scheme

·  Individual breakdowns for Growth Deal and WMCA schemes in 2017/18 in separate appendices.

Officers went through the programme line by line and answered Members’ questions.  In respect of a question on the City Centre capital spend, the Board requested data on the gross value added for Coventry citizens on those projects which had been finalised. 

Outstanding issues have been picked up in the Work Programme

There were no outstanding issues.

Report of the Scrutiny Co-ordinator

The work programme was noted.

Any other items of public business which the Chair decides to take as matters of urgency because of the special circumstances involved

There were no other items of public business.