Agenda item - CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STRATEGY

Agenda item

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STRATEGY

To receive a presentation from Sally McTernan, AD Special Projects.

Minutes:

Kari Manovitch (Acting Director, Customer Experience and Change) introduced the Customer Experience Strategy – 2018-2022.

She explained that the Strategy aims to deliver a positive customer experience ‘Enfield is committed to putting customers at the heart of all Council business’ and it is aligned with the new corporate vision of ‘creating a lifetime of opportunities in Enfield’.

 

The Strategy will be presented to Cabinet on Wednesday 12 September 2018.  As a subject of pre-decision scrutiny, the views of Overview and Scrutiny Committee were requested.

 

The following was highlighted:

  • This is the first time the council has established a customer experience strategy.
  • It sets a framework that will guide the work of the council over the next four years to ensure customers benefit from a positive customer experience and ensuring that this is a key priority for all departments.
  • It includes standards/ behaviours for staff to adopt i.e being friendly and helpful, honest and respectful, professional and courteous.
  • There is a maturity model in the framework which is an analytical tool to enable us to assess how each service is performing/ improving over the years.

 

The following issues were raised

  • The recommendations in the strategy report are aligned to those in the Cabinet report.
  • Two of the current Overview and Scrutiny Committee members had been involved in the Enfield 2017 Scrutiny Workstream and it was asked if its findings had been absorbed into the strategy with respect to the impact ‘Enfield 2017’ had on customers. It was confirmed that it had. It was acknowledged that the priorities for ‘Enfield 2017’ had been about transformation and delivering efficiencies, it had not prioritised the customer experience.  It was agreed that we were not delivering a consistently positive experience for customers at present.
  • Members supported the principles of the strategy and agreed that everyone wanted to see service improvements and for people to get the support they needed.  However, there was concern about the complexity of the strategy such as whether it was necessary to have five stages of improvement in the maturity model instead of three.  It was explained that this was the starting point of a journey in which we will evaluate the tools in the strategy and adjust them if they prove too complex in practice. We are also creating new measures, that have not been used before to assess services to see whether a consistent positive customer experience is provided.
  • Councillor Levy suggested that it may be helpful to provide scenarios to show how the strategy’s principles would work in practice as this may be easier for people to understand.
  • It was thought that the standards/ behaviours mentioned should already be a requirement for all people working for LB Enfield.
  • It was asked if it was thought the strategy would empower our customers or would it lead to a more ‘dependency’ creating situation?  It was stated that it would not be in the council’s interests to create more dependency as it is important that we are able to concentrate our reducing resources on those that most need us, by promoting self-service for those that can.

 

It was noted that

  • OSC had worked only from the Customer Experience Strategy document and not the actual Cabinet report
  • All comments made were purely observational rather than critical, to potentially inform and enhance how the report might be better articulated at Cabinet.

 

AGREED

  1. The Committee agreed the recommendations of the report with consideration being given to the inclusion of scenarios to show how the Customer Experience Strategy may work in practice.
  2. Quarterly updates to be provided to future meetings of Overview and Scrutiny Committee.

Supporting documents: