Why did you wish to achieve the Customer Service Excellence Standard
We have always been a team committed to providing the highest level of support to our customers, primarily students in our case. A big part of the driver for achieving the Customer Service Excellence Standard was to ensure the hard work and dedication of the team was recognised. The other main reason for us pursuing the standard was to ensure we had a continuous focus on service improvement and were able to step back and review what we were doing well, and where things could be done differently, in order to ensure we remained responsive to the needs of our customers.
The Approach to achieving the Standard
Achieving the standard was a whole team effort. We ensured we collaborated with staff to get their views on how we met the standard and what was important to get across in our assessment. This involved a number of focus groups where staff were given themes or elements from the standard to focus on and brainstorm how they felt we met it.
Our management team then took a lead on pulling together the thoughts of the team and adding our own to ensure a cohesive response.
We used the CSE standard document (available on the CSE website) to ensure we addressed each element fully when completing the self-assessment tool; we found the guidance in this document really useful to fully understand the nuances of each element and to ensure our written guidance and evidence successfully addressed what was being asked for.
We also attended a number of Network & Chat discussions and found the meeting that focussed on higher education and universities particularly useful.
The Impact / Benefits of working with the Customer Service Excellence Standard
Whilst I believe our team already offered a high level of customer service, it has helped us think about the underlying principles that underpin this delivery and what we needed to do to ensure we had effective governance structures in place in terms e.g. how and why do we collect feedback and what do we do with it?
It made sure that what were previously ad-hoc exercises became cemented within our core delivery and that CSE elements were always in the forefront of our mind when we considered introducing something new or adapting something we currently do.
It’s encouraged us to look at what we do through a different lens and really question every aspect of our service to understand whether what we were doing was still fit for purpose e.g. are our wait times reflective of the reality and what can we do about that? As a result of our assessment, we’re starting to reconsider who we benchmark our services against and how this can be broadened out to consider those beyond the higher education sector.
Our customers have had an increased insight into what we do through virtue of us considering how we raise awareness of the services we offer and increased opportunities for students to get involved in focus groups and service design. It’s also helped us to strengthen relationships with partners by ensuring dedicated time was in place to review how we work together and harness our collaboration to the best effect.
Having just achieved the standard, we will be holding off on celebrating this across our organisation until the New Year so that the achievement gets due attention after the festivities! I hope this will put a spotlight on the work carried out across the whole team to support our students and positively impact the student experience.
The Assessment Feedback
We ensured that all of the team involved in speaking to our assessor were present in the feedback meeting; this also mean they could help feedback on the outcome to colleagues (in addition to our formal communication regarding the result).
It was brilliant for staff in a number of roles across the service to hear about the areas of strength we demonstrated as this was a direct reflection on the work they do to support our students and important recognition of the role they play. We will ensure these strengths are celebrated and promoted alongside the achievement of the standard.
It was also extremely useful to hear about our areas for improvement; we have set up time in the New Year to review these as a management team where we hope to come up with a suggested action plan of what we can do to address these. We will run this by the team to ensure their view is also included and also organise relevant student focus groups to seek their feedback on how they think we could tackle some of the areas for improvement e.g. what is of most importance to our students; is it always timeliness (which we tend to measure more at the moment) or is quality of response a bigger priority for them?
Why did you choose Assessment Services as your assessment body?
Assessment Services were recommended to us by a previous member of the University who had gone through the CSE Standard at another organisation.
We were impressed by the amount of support on offer through the Assessment Services Community site and the online sessions available that covered a variety of topics with different audiences considered.
The self-assessment platform was easy to use and the support available from Richard and Graeme, whenever we needed it, cemented our decision!
Author
Katharine Outhwaite
