Working towards Customer Service Excellence

Paul Hindley

Assessorsaurus Rex

• or terrible assessor

Assessorpinkus Fluff

• Or fluffy assessor

Customer Service Excellence

• Practical aspects of the assessment

• Segmentation

• Customer journey maps

• Corporate approach

• Pre-assessments

• Questions

The Five Drivers of Customer Satisfaction1. Delivery - the service delivers the outcome it promised and manages to

deal with any problems that may arise

2. Timeliness – the service responds immediately to the initial customer contact and deals with the issue at the heart of it quickly and without passing it on between staff

3. Professionalism – staff are competent and treat customers fairly

4. Information - the information given out to customers is accurate and comprehensive and they are kept informed about progress

5. Staff attitude - staff are friendly, polite and sympathetic to customers’ needs

(Source - Cabinet Office OPSR 2004)

Customer Service Excellence Standard

• Structure of standard - 5 Criteria, 57 elements (see booklet)

• Compliance terms:– Compliance plus (good/best practice)– Full compliance– Partial compliance– Major non compliance

Scoring

• Scoring system – maximum 11 partials overall; in Criteria 1,2,3 & 5, max. 2 per Criterion; in Criterion 4, max 3 partials

• Threshold raised to 80% compliance

• Assessment outcomes– Accreditation– Remedial action

Segmentation

Segmentation is: ‘Subdividing a target audience into homogeneous and reachable groups based on shared needs and characteristics such as:

• who they are (socio-demographics)• what they do (their behaviour)• how they think and feel (their attitudes and

needs)’

Examples of Segmentation

• Hard to reach groups - homeless, travelers

• Based on needs - single parent families, unemployed, young/elderly

• Based on attitudes – disaffected, ethnic minorities, those who don’t engage with any official bodies.

Customer Journey Maps

a customer journey map is:

• a way to describe the experiences of a customer during their interaction with a service or set of services;

• and the emotional responses these provoke, from their first consideration of a related need, to receiving the service outcome.

Customer Journey Maps

???? Council

Parks Sports & Leisure

Corporate Application Structure

LibrariesMarketsMuseums &Heritage

Community &Play

Corporate Programme – Step 1

• All frontline and internal support services have to reach 80% compliance for an organisation to achieve corporate accreditation

• Starting point is the ‘corporate evidence evaluation’

Corporate Programme – Step 2

Individual Service Level assessments;

- Service level applicants review evaluated corporate evidence on pre-filled template

- Service level applications complete tool with service specific evidence

- Some areas of standard easier to demonstrate compliance locally

- Compliance reporting for whole organisation – identified trends in strengths/ weaknesses.

Benefits of Pre-assessment

Meeting between assessor and writing team :

• Evidence gap analysis of entire application – documentary evidence only

• Highlights strengths and weaknesses in evidence and practice – report provided

• Applicant first time success rate is a very high proportion over 95% following pre-assessment (if applying for full assessment within 6 months)

Questions and hopefully answers

Q & A