If you feel you have a need to complain or just wish to pass comment or give a compliment on any service received, please visit the Council's Complaints Policy.  We welcome you views in order to continually improve.

 

Corporate Standards

 

The Council sets minimum performance standards for how quickly it responds to your service requests.

 

Telephone:

 

The Council's minimum standard for speed of response of answering calls is 90% within 4 rings or 11 seconds.

 

Performance in 2006/7 was 95% (up 1% on 2005/6).  This was externally validated in 2006/7 by a mystery shopping exercise that rated this performance as excellent with 91% of calls tested answered within this target.  However, in order to test the quality of the calls made the exercise looked at "announcement" and "call handling" which corporately overall was in need of some improvement as the Council received an overall rating of 62% in 2006. 

 

The Mystery Shopping Results of 2007/8 rated telephone calls corporately as "weak" scoring overall 66%, though this was an improved performance from 2006. This is only 4% below "good". Further measures are in hand to continue to improve performance for 2008/9. Click on the Customer Satisfaction Survey 2007/8 below to view the summary. 

 

Telephone responses corporately were recorded as 95% for the year 2007/8, 5% above the minimum target of 90% across all services. This maintains the result of 2006/7.

 

The exercise will be undertaken again in subsequent years to measure on-going performance standards.

 

Letter Answering:

 

The Council sets a minimum standard for all letters that require a response as follows:

 

Full reply or acknowledgement within 7 days or

between 8 and 14 days for a full reply to be sent if it has been previously acknowledged.

 

Performance is reported to the Council's Management Team and to the Council's Joint Local Committee with staff and union representation.

 

E-mail:

 

The Council sets a standard of responding to all external e-mails that require a response within 24 hours.

 

This standard was externally validated in 2006/7 by the mystery shopping exercise that reported a 78.5% rating of "average to good".  Improvements are being identified to achieve excellence.

 

This standard was again externally validated in 2007/8 and scored a rating of 88% "good".  Further improvements are being identified to hopefully become "excellent" during 2008/9.

 

Personal visits:

 

For customer standards and performance see under "Customer Services".

 

Links

 

PDF Document: Customer Satisfaction Survey Results 2007/8 (278KB)

 

Contact:

 

Karen Childs

Customer Services Manager

Telephone: (01902) 696526
Fax: (01902) 696800
Email: k.childs@sstaffs.gov.uk