Customer service peer reviews

Delivering your services in the way people need and want lies at the heart of the customer services peer review. The review helps you focus on whether you are meeting customer expectations for better access to information and services. It helps you identify and share good practice to improve your customers’ experience.

The reviews have been carried out right across the tiers of local government and draw on a significant body of work and learning from authorities.

This peer review takes a holistic approach and will enable you to celebrate success and identify areas for improvement. It will help you establish customer service as a key function that is owned and driven at a corporate level to ensure that customers’ experience is consistently good.

Corporate improvement

Much work has been done in local government to improve access to information and services. Councils have developed websites, introduced contact centres with extended opening hours, one-stop shops and home visits for customers with special needs.

However, customer service needs to be owned and driven at a corporate level to ensure that the customer's experience is consistently good across all services and access channels. Customer service is more than a website and a contact centre. It is about how the organisation operates and more importantly, how it views, understands and responds to its customers, so that it can better anticipate and plan the delivery of services around them.

A number of national initiatives make this agenda increasingly important, including:

• comprehensive performance assistance (CPA) 2005, the 'harder test', which integrates customer service principles throughout its new assessment framework
• the Local Government Reputation Project, which addresses the current poor perception of local government in direct contradiction to the good experience with councils on the ground
• the Gershon (Efficiency) Agenda, which every council now needs to use to drive improvements in service delivery both internally and externally
• the Choice Agenda, which advocates the need for high quality public services that are flexible, accountable and personalised
• the Children’s Act, which requires councils to manage and share information more effectively both internally across different service areas and externally with key partners, to ensure the safety and welfare of all children in their care
• increased customer take-up of e-enabled services, which should allow better access to services at lower cost
• 'double devolution', which devolves power from central government to local government and from councils to neighbourhoods; David Miliband’s institutional agenda highlights the importance of empowering individual citizens

The IDeA believes that this a significant step forward in the sector's ability to develop its own improvement mechanisms.