Environmental Health Performance and Customer Satisfaction

Environmental Health Performance

We are determined to provide the best environmental health service possible to our businesses, residents and visitors in East Devon.

We review quality and aim to provide the services that our customers want in a way best suited to them.

We log all service requests and regularly monitor the progress of our investigations to ensure that nothing is lost, missed or unnecessarily delayed. We are exploring all the ways in which people may wish to contact us including web comment/complaint messaging, text and e-mail messaging.

We invite feedback using customer satisfaction forms; we hold focus groups seeking ideas for improvements to our service and we meet with local people during neighbourhood assessments; at town and market shows and events and through our work with schools to make sure our service fits local demand.

Every service request is important to us and we set target response times to ensure that customers receive prompt attention, early assessment of the issue and, where appropriate, an action to fully meet their demand.

Environmental Health Customer Satisfaction Surveys

We are proud of our outstanding environment and are committed to making sure that East Devon is an outstanding place for people to live in, to work in and to visit. The Council provides a range of investigation, inspection and enforcement services under the umbrella of Environmental Health and the purpose of these services is to protect and improve the health, safety and wellbeing of those people.

We have traditionally carried out customer satisfaction surveys asking a sample of people who have asked us to look into a specific problem or to take a particular action for their views on the service they received.

During November 2011 we decided to carry out a pilot telephone survey of our customers rather than using our traditional postal questionnaire. We felt this may have a number of advantages including providing us with immediate data and an opportunity to respond to dissatisfaction and unresolved problems there and then.

This survey looked at around 1200 service requests which we had dealt with and closed during the period 1 April 2011 to 30 September 2011. The service requests covered a range of services including complaints about noisy neighbours, nuisance insects, nuisance bonfires, complaints about poor hygiene standards in food businesses, requests for advice on starting up new food businesses, complaints about poor standards in rented housing, requests for help with blocked drains and sewers etc. etc. During the telephone survey we were able to interview 104 customers.

The general picture is of customers who are being contacted in a timely manner and the majority are reporting a satisfactory outcome. Individual issues of dissatisfaction that were not able to be resolved at the time of the survey are now being taken up by service managers during one to one sessions with Officers and further action will be taken as appropriate.

This method of survey appears to work well for us and we intend to continue to engage with our customers in this way on an ongoing basis.

Each customer was asked for their response to eight questions and the results for each of the service teams are presented below.

PDF file Environment Protection team - summary of results (115KB - 07 December 2011 - PDF Help)

PDF file Housing team - summary of results. (116KB - 07 December 2011 - PDF Help)

PDF file Commercial team - summary of results. (117KB - 07 December 2011 - PDF Help)

Feedback on services.

If you have any comments about our customer service standards or would like to let us have any complaints or compliments about a service you have received please let us know by clicking the icon "Contact us online"  under 'Useful Contacts' at the top of this page.

We are keen to receive this feedback, good or bad, from customers as it helps to improve the way we deliver our services.

Page last updated on 7 December 2011