Case study: Driving up customer satisfaction in the public sector
A high performing Borough Council reinforces recognition that ratepayers are customers too
Business challenge
Councils must focus on delivering value for money services and put the ratepayer at the heart of all that they do. Our client, a successful Borough Council, was scoring well and a significant leader in its peer group but had the ambition to score consistently as excellent in its customer care measures. Scoring consistently high across all indicators is a real challenge for organisations who deal with diverse customers and deliver a range of different services to customers who frequently see themselves as ‘hostages’ and not free agents.
The Council has an agreed Customer Charter and strives to continuously improve its services and to deliver high quality customer service. Performance monitoring procedures are in place to check and report on the standards being achieved.
The Council needed to ensure that employees were fully aware of, committed to and capable of delivering its Customer Charter. Employees were required to develop the skills and confidence to continuously satisfy the needs of a diverse customer base and to contribute to the activities necessary for improving and sustaining customer satisfaction ratings.
Echelon’s solution
Echelon designed a highly participative experiential learning programme that focused participants at all levels on really understanding the challenges to delivering consistent customer care:
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the specific needs the same customers might have of different services, for example Planning and Leisure Services
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the specific needs that diverse customers might have of the same service
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the different perceptions that senior managers and service deliverers have of the same service. For example senior managers are concerned with the design of service and equitable outcomes whilst service deliverers are concerned with tailoring service for individual outcomes.
The programme also helped employees develop appropriate communication styles to ensure needs are properly identified and met for customer and colleague interactions alike.
Key benefits
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Customer ratings have increased to a consistent 85% satisfaction level and on many indicators by over 20% during the course of the programme.
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Participants have generated and implemented a wealth of ideas for continually improving service levels.
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Performance is tracked via a Service Index to provide visible ongoing service data to the organisation.
Echelon’s approach
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Research
Echelon was retained to design and deliver a customer care programme over two years in support of the Council’s objectives and performance standards. We started by examining statistics and reports of past performance and identifying the key areas of customer concern. We gathered employee views and experienced services first hand to identify potential causes of underperformance and consider possible solutions.
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Buy-in
Employees’ buy-in to the importance of the programme was achieved by offering employees choice at every stage.
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Cascaded management briefings informed them about their choices in actively building the programme.
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A series of pilot workshops enabled people from all departments to build the content and select their preferred Echelon trainers.
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A highly-effective buy-in technique was used in the training workshops: Forum Theatre. Forum Theatre involves the participants working with professional actors on real researched scenarios. The actors play out the scenario and then invite participants to suggest and demonstrate different behaviours that will improve the success of customer service interactions.
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A 1,000 Ideas campaign enabled participants to put forward improvement ideas and to witness their adoption and the effect they had on improving performance scores.
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Training
The reality training solution comprised a one-day Forum Theatre event consisting of four independent modules. Large groups drawn from across the Council participated together in witnessing real scenarios role played by actors. Together they rebuilt each scenario, in so doing confirming how they could and would deliver consistent service across all departments - be they professional services such as Planning or consumer services such as Rubbish Collection. This approach enabled the whole organisation to question attitudes, sharpen insight, share experiences, and develop helpful techniques and shared language for communicating with customers and colleagues in a variety of ‘real’ situations.
In addition to Forum Theatre, the programme employed a range of team-based and thought-provoking approaches, including Posters and TableMAPS which set out the Council’s values and standards as a focus. All the standards were covered during the 4 modules with specific standards being highlighted by participants in each module.
Innovative workbooks were provided for participants to complete as a personal memory jogger of key learning. The Programme is supported with a series of half day Skillbuilder workshops on topics such as negotiation and presentation skills.
Work based application of learning is encouraged with a range of creative learning tools including:
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the Council-wide 1,000 ideas campaign
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departmental Team Challenge Cards
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web-enabled evaluation and follow-up offering a number of work-based tools for reinforcement and performance support.
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Communication
The customer care initiative receives consistent communication through day-to-day management. Implementation of a service level index facilitates mapping of performance against the KPIs in the Council’s service value chain and highlights areas that may need further attention. This published information enables employees to judge departmental and organisational success.
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Sustaining the initiative
An important output of the programme consists of a directory of Best Ideas distilled from the 1,000 Ideas campaign for further development in the Council. These are employee-generated ideas for improving performance and customer satisfaction.
Performance improvement is tracked via the service index KPIs and this stimulates further analysis and prioritising of future improvement activities.
Echelon created a branded website of information, learning and support tools to assist employees in applying their new skills. These toolkits can be a key contributor to the goal of improved consistency in customer service performance across the organisation.
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Evaluating the outcome
Evaluation of the training programme is achieved by immediate post-course analysis of feedback and by measurement of post-training skills transfer to the workplace using a range of assessment tools.
Local authorities are subject to continuous performance measurement that is used relatively to assess movement over time in local service provision and customer satisfaction with it, and nationally to benchmark organisational performance.
Echelon, Angles House, 210 Sheen Lane, London SW14 8LB; 020 8274 9965