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
- 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.
- Quarterly updates to be provided to future meetings of Overview
and Scrutiny Committee.