To approve the Customer Care Strategy following a recommendation from the Overview and Scrutiny Committee.

That the Customer Care Strategy and action plan be APPROVED.  

84.1          The report of the Head of Corporate Services, circulated at Pages No. 121-134, detailed the Customer Care Strategy which Members were asked to approve in line with a recommendation from the Overview and Scrutiny Committee.

84.2          The Corporate Services Manager explained that the new strategy would help raise the profile of customer care and placed importance on the experience of customers and an understanding of how the standard of care influenced their opinion of the Council.  The strategy was split into sections; it looked at who the Council’s customers were, what they were telling the Council, what was meant by customer service and role of the teams within the Council. To ensure the Council was fulfilling its promise to put its customers first, and put them at the heart of what it did, the strategy set out six themes and an action plan complemented those themes. The themes highlighted what the Council needed to focus on to achieve a high level of customer satisfaction: introducing a fresh set of customer service standards – this was very useful as it made it clear to customers what they could expect - the main change, identified at Appendix 2 to the report, was that staff were encouraged to take ownership of calls they received as well as the introduction of a reduction in the number of days taken to respond to emails from 10 to five to reflect best practice and meet customer expectations; to make it easier, simpler and more convenient for customers to interact with the Council when requiring a service – the Customer Services Team Leader was supporting changes in the Planning Admin Team to ensure customer care sat at the heart of the service and that first contact resolution was a priority; use feedback from residents to help shape future service delivery – the Citizens’ Panel was a useful tool but an extensive residents satisfaction survey was required; make sure staff were equipped with the skills to deliver high quality customer service – this did not come naturally to some people so there was a need to ensure customer service training was available to all; promote channel shift to provide services in a way that was more convenient for customers and less expensive for the Council – by doing this, capacity would be freed up to support customers who needed the more traditional methods of communication; and working with partners in the Public Services Centre to ensure customers had a seamless and worthwhile experience when visiting the offices. The Corporate Services Manager explained that, since the COVID-19 pandemic, the way customers contacted the Council had changed and the impacts of that had been managed really well with very little negative feedback. The demand for the Area Information Centres had been very low as customers had been content with phone calls and virtual meetings and it was felt this success needed to be captured and encouraged but with the recognition that there would always be a need for face-to-face options.

84.3          It was