Focus on

The Revenues and Housing Benefits Teams at Spelthorne Borough Council have underlined their service credentials with the award of the new Customer Service Excellence standard from SGS United Kingdom Ltd.

Customer Service Excellence (CSE) is a new national standard and a practical tool to encourage and enable organisations to implement customer-focused change and continuously improve their services. CSE requires organisations to demonstrate:

• Customer insight, by understanding and involving customers in the drive for ever higher levels of service excellence, efficiency and effectiveness
  
  
• A customer-focused culture, for example encouraging and using feedback from customer-facing staff
  
  
• Accessibility and accurate, complete information for all customers, for example publicising the services available, listing contact and any charging details, and co-operating with other organisations to provide seamless services
  
  
• Delivery improvements, for example by: setting, monitoring, meeting and exceeding service level agreements; dealing with problems and learning from them; encouraging and acting on customer feedback; and benchmarking and adopting best practice
  
  
• Timeliness and quality of service, for example responding to customer calls and e-mails reliably and promptly.

SGS United Kingdom Assessment

The Revenues and Housing Benefits Teams at Spelthorne Borough Council chose SGS, a United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) certification body to carry out its CSE assessment and the SGS auditor, John Frankcom was full of praise for the work of the two teams:

‘The Revenues and Housing Benefits Teams at Spelthorne Borough Council are committed to the new standard and to service delivery.’

‘They took a very full and thorough approach to addressing the new standard. They already have a long-standing commitment to customer care, and their work here clearly demonstrated that they looked hard at what they were being asked to do.’

Benefits of the new Standard

‘The new standard definitely offers something for organisations to get their teeth into,’ says John Frankcom. ‘Once they start using the standard, organisations will see the benefits of examining their own customer service.’

In fact, Spelthorne Council is already reaping the rewards. ‘The award has raised the esteem and value or our teams, and other staff in the organisation are starting to talk about doing it for themselves,’ says Linda Norman, Spelthorne Borough Council Revenues Manager.

‘The new standard is also bringing improvements to the counter – our front line of customer service.’ says Norman.

The SGS Group is the global leader and innovator in inspection, verification, testing and certification services. Founded in 1878, SGS is recognised as the global benchmark in quality and integrity. With more than 53,000 employees, SGS operates a network of over 1,000 offices and laboratories around the world.