Minutes:
O&S 83
In line with the request for ‘Customer Satisfaction Progress Updates’ to become a standing agenda item for the Committee (Minute *HC 50 refers), the lead Hub Committee Member for Customer First made reference to:-
- officers having begun implementing the actions arising from the recently approved Improvement Plan;
- overall call volumes continuing to reduce. As a result, the Member informed that call answering performance had improved. To expand upon the point, the Contact Centre had received 7,500 calls last month (2,000 less than the same period last year) and this was the lowest monthly figure ever recorded. Of these calls, 91% were answered (with 85% of these in less than 5 minutes). The Member advised that historical trend analysis illustrated that for the year to date (April to December 2018), the Contact Centre had received 20,000 less calls in comparison to April to December 2017 and an astonishing 72,000 less than April to December 2016;
- the creation of a customer feedback button on the Council website. Within the next month, the Member advised that the Council would be rolling out the feedback part as part of online forms and processes. As a consequence, users completing a request for service online would be able to advise whether or not it had worked for them and/or was easy to complete;
- work was ongoing to investigate solutions to contact customers after a service had been delivered in order to measure their satisfaction;
- Specialists and Managers had been allocated to focus on improving the Council’s high volume priority areas: Waste and Planning;
- in Waste, officers had been working with the Communications Team to simplify messaging which had reduced demand on Garden Waste and Christmas Collections. Whilst the statistics were not yet available, the Member advised that volumes of customer reports and calls appeared to have been significantly reduced in comparison to previous years;
- officers had started work on reviewing and improving the Council’s missed collection process. The lead Member informed that she would report back on this work at the next meeting of the Committee;
- in Development Management, officers were working on introducing more communication with the customer so that (s)he was kept informed at every step of the planning process. The IT was currently being configured and testing was expected to commence during the week commencing Monday, 21 January 2019. If this testing went to plan, it was intended that it would go live before the end of January 2019. The next step with the Development Management service was to provide more detail and status updates within the online search function and the target was to achieve this in March 2019;
- objectives had been rolled out for the Case Management teams. By the end of January 2019, teams would be reviewing all complaints received within their work areas and would be focusing on fixing the issues that had generated the complaints in the first place. The Member proceeded to advise of her intention to show the complaints received (and the fixes that had been implemented) to the Committee in the upcoming months; and
- the Council had successfully rolled out a pilot to the Council Tax Case Management team that automatically prioritised work against the resources available. Members were advised that this had reduced the workload significantly and, by the end of January, this pilot would be extended into the Housing Benefits service area and officers were working on a roll-out plan for all service areas.
In the ensuing discussion, the following points were raised:
(a) In light of the current senior officer absences in Development Management, remedial measures were being put in place to mitigate the impact as far as was practically possible. Furthermore, officers informed that they were monitoring the impact of these absences on a daily basis;
(b) It was noted that the draft Members Code of Planning Practice was to be presented, in the first instance, to the Audit Committee at its meeting on 22 January 2019;
(c) Some Members commented that the reductions in call volume suggested that the onus that was being placed on Channel Shift was starting to reap benefits.