Putting our customers in control means challenging our assumptions about how best to engage with them and understand their needs in order to provide a better online customer experience.
Where we are now
Customers have always been at the heart of what we do as a Council.
In 2016 we achieved full corporate accreditation in Customer Service Excellence, with all our services being able to demonstrate how we listen and respond to our customers’ needs.
In terms of customer contact, our Govmetric feedback system provides us with around 1,500 customer responses each month. While our telephone service consistently scores highly, our web service scores don't yet match these levels.
We know that many of our customers prefer to telephone us as they feel it is more efficient or because our online services do not provide them with the information they need to avoid making a call.
Our use of social media is allowing us to build up a better picture of our customers and their interests, and so target our communications more specifically. In May 2016 we generated over 568,000 impressions on Facebook from just over £1,400 in targetted promotion.
How we need to change
Building on the success we already have, we will:
- Work to improve satisfaction with our web channel to help encourage people to do more online.
- Introduce a single customer account for our residents covering all our online services
- Provide online progress tracking for customers to reduce their need to call us
- Promote personalised information through our website based on our customer intelligence
- Prioritise the development of new digital services for those where there is the highest demand from customers
- Research the potential for our customers to move to use digital services and promote them more effectively
- Develop new channels to interact with customers to meet their needs
- Look to create more digital-only services, with assisted digital help where appropriate
Key Facts
- We receive over 227,000 telephone calls and deal with over 36,500 face-to-face enquiries each year (2016/17)
- Our Contact Centre telephony service has a satisfaction rating above 99%
- 33% of our callers choose the telephone because it’s more efficient and 7.5% because the service is not available online
- Social media contact is growing rapidly with almost 118,000 engagements on Facebook and 58,00 on Twitter in 2016/17. Facebook likes have increased to 10,500 and we have 41,500 Twitter followers
- Our mobile app delivers over 4,700 bin collection reminders per week