Conwy County Borough Council’s Environment, Roads and Facilities section has just completed their 3 year Review Assessment against the Customer Service Excellence Standard.
We value CSE – it’s important because it allows us to evaluate our service and enables us to provide an improved experience to customers. Our customers know what to expect from us. We listen too, and engage with customers in feedback, which helps us deliver improved performance and share best-practice across the service.
Because it’s important to us, we didn’t want to defer the assessment due to uncertain times. At the moment, providing a good customer experience is even more important than usual, when our services are changing rapidly and customers have different needs.
The assessment was carried out during the lockdown period, so Assessment Services arranged a remote assessment following the government’s Covid-19 measures.
We completed and upload the self-assessment and supporting documentation and the assessor gave us guidance on what she was looking for during the desktop review.
This was followed by 3 days of evidence collection, with interviews with staff members and partner organisations conducted via Skype or phone. The assessor was able to get a strategic overview of our organisation and service, and how this supports providing excellent customer service.
This was a new experience for us all but it worked well. The assessment was extremely thorough and was carried out just as though it was an on-site visit. The assessor made the whole experience so easy for us. She provided positive and constructive feedback and the remote interviews worked really well and ran smoothly.
This may well be the way we conduct the assessments in future.
