Agenda item

Briefing Note of the Deputy Chief Executive (People)

The Committee considered a briefing note of the Director of Customer Services and Transformation, which provided an update on Customer Services, including performance and customer satisfaction.

In 2015 the Customer Journey programme brought together initial customer contact into one service area and achieved target savings of £500k.  The programme implemented a number of changes to improve the customer experience when contacting the Council, including:

·  The creation of a My Account area on the Council’s website, enabling customers to request service 24/7.

·  The introduction of a new phone system to help manage calls more effectively.

·  The delivery of the Customer Service Centre in Broadgate House, bringing together all the city centre reception points into one place.

The Committee were advised that Customer Services now dealt with initial customer enquiries relating to services across the Council such as Council Tax, Housing and Homelessness, Housing Benefits, Parking Services, Highways, Electoral Services, Waste Services, Adult Services, Blue Badges, Register Office, Pest Control and Street Scene.

In July 2016 Business Services (the administrative support for the organisation) joined Customer Services under one Head of Service.  The service had a target saving of £1.75m.  To date £1.12m had been delivered (£1.2m full year effect).  There was an ongoing programme of transformation to continue to drive the changes necessary to both achieve the remaining savings and deliver an improved service.

In terms of performance, the note indicated that, following the creation of My Account and increased availability of self-service options for customers, there had been a change in how customers contacted the Council.  In 2013 less than 1% of all customer contact was self-service, compared to 31% in 2017.

In Customer Services during 2017/18 to date, approximately 25,100 more calls had been answered than were answered during the previous financial year with the call answer rate increasing from 59% to 72%.  Approximately 260,000 calls had been answered from April 2017 to January 2018 and the answer rate had increased by 13%.  The average wait time to answer had fallen from 06:49 to 05:40 – an improvement of 1 minute 19 seconds.

Customer Services General Enquiries (formerly Coventry Direct), had answered over 22,300 more calls than the previous year, and the current answer rate of 70% was an improvement of 18% over the same period last year.  So far during 2017/18, 113,682 calls had been answered, whereas just over 91,300 calls were answered by this time last year.  Wait times had dropped by over 2 minutes. The average wait time so far during the year was 04:48, which was much improved over last January when the average wait time was 06:50.

Council Tax had also shown significant improvement, and call answer rates had increased from 48% at this time in 2016/17 to 63% for 2017/18. Approximately 7,000 more calls had been answered since the start of the financial year.  From April 2017 to January 2018, approximately 54,000 were answered, which marked a 15% increase over the 47,000 that were answered by this time last year.  Wait time to answer had fallen by more than 3 minutes, from 13:24 last year to 10:15 so far this financial year.

The Committee acknowledged that the Council recognised the importance of using performance measures in conjunction with customer feedback to identify the things it was doing well, and to highlight the areas where development was required.  As such, various forms of customer feedback had been collected over the past few years to inform the improvement programme.  The note set out the various customer surveys that had been undertaken since the Customer Service Centre opened.  The last survey was undertaken in August 2017 with face to face and telephone service customers.  Satisfaction levels were higher than at the one-year anniversary survey, with an overall satisfaction score of 4.68 and an overall positive response of 97%.

The future programme of change would include more online services available to customers over the coming months; a focus on refining processes to save organisational effort and improve customers’ experience when dealing with the council; and monitoring feedback about online services and identify where these could be improved for customers.

There remained a commitment to improve performance based on feedback received from customers and, at the same time, maintaining a focus of evolving the service offer to allow the Council to exploit technology and achieve efficiency.

In considering the information provided, the Committee expressed their concern that the call waiting times were still significantly longer than they felt it was reasonable for customers to wait.  They were advised that the Finance and Corporate Services Scrutiny Board (1) had been looking at the work of the Customer Service Centre and the Committee recommended that the Board continue to monitor this service area.

RESOLVED that the Audit and Procurement Committee:-

1.  Note the content of the briefing note.

2.  Recommend that the Finance and Corporate Services Scrutiny Board (1) continue to monitor the work of the Customer Service Centre.