Customer Access

Long term vision

Our ambition drives us to look for year on year improvements in how we deliver our services. Our vision is to provide quality and easily accessible services across all our service areas to ensure we are providing quality services how, when and where our customers would like them.

Our aim is to develop better communication with our customers so we can keep them informed on service issues which they have said are important to them. To achieve this we need to win the hearts and minds of our staff in putting customers first.

The position now and key challenges we face

We have come a long way over recent years and have continued to demonstrate our commitment to excellent customer service. The introduction of the Customer Service Centre, an award winning website that helps us deliver services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, Service Excellence training and Customer Standards which have all helped to facilitate a culture of ‘customers first’. We have also placed more emphasis on consulting and involving our customers in setting priorities and in how we deliver services.

Despite these achievements, we need to improve further. The General Survey in 2006 shows us that we particularly need to improve the way we keep people informed about our progress on issues which they have highlighted as important to them.

Customer Focused Improvement

Customer focused improvement is one of the core values that drives East Devon District Council.  Following feedback from customers and inspectors, it is apparent there are pockets of excellence within the Council but equally there are areas that require customer focused improvements.

The way we work at the moment means that we have:

• different reception points
• a confusing 48 published telephone contact numbers for our services
• phones that don’t always get answered
• high satisfaction with individual services but overall satisfaction with the council is in the bottom 25% of councils in England.

Also, in a recent mystery shopper exercise:

• over 33% of calls were answered poorly
• 20% of voicemail messages were very poor

As a result, we want to deliver faster, better targeted services, how, when and where our customers want them. To help achieve this we will:

• continue with our good practice of offering home visits where they are requested
• introduce nationally recognised best practice standards in customer service, and
• introduce a Customer Service Centre which will be able to deal with 80% of your enquiries on a once and done basis.  This means that the person who picks up the phone to answer your call will be able to answer all your questions, even if they are about several different services.

You can  download the Council's Customer Service Strategy here (100KB - 10 September 2006 - PDF Help).

The Council’s Commitment

With the introduction of this Strategy, the Council aims to provide a set of standards and targets for all of the Council's services to meet.

EDDC is totally committed to achieving service excellence over the coming years. This is the first structured attempt at achieving a consistent customer service led culture, which puts in place standards and targets for all services. They are demanding but reflect best practices which have been agreed nationally. We want to be at the forefront of customer service excellence and our Customer Service Centre will play a key role in the measurement and analysis of service delivery across the Council.

By improving our customers' access to services, by using clever technology to make the way we work more efficient and by delivering service excellence training to all our employees, customer service will be improved to reach the targets set out in the Customer Service Strategy.

Page last updated on 11 April 2008