Agenda and minutes

Members are reminded of their responsibility to declare any pecuniary interest in respect of matters contained in this agenda.

If you have a pecuniary interest you must withdraw from the meeting. Normally you should leave the room before the business starts to be discussed. You do, however, have the same right to speak as a member of the public and may remain in the room to enable you to exercise that right and then leave immediately. In either case you must not seek to improperly influence a decision on the matter.

No declarations of interests were declared.

To effectively scope the review, members of the Customer Services team will deliver a presentation on the delivery of the Single Front Office project.

The Head of Customer and ICT Services presented Members with a high level overview of how the Single Front Office had evolved since its inception in 2001/02. It was around this time that there was a general trend across public services to mirror the workings of private industries in relation to how it communicated with its residents.  The development of the new customer services model consolidated all reception areas across the Council along with the different methods that the public used to access its services to provide a holistic approach and overview with one central access point.

The Council were able to use all its intelligence data across all of its services to tailor its services more effectively for the customer and give a more enhance experience at first contact. The biggest physical change to this new way of working was face to face contact with the customer. In order to facilitate the whole of the Council’s services being able to be accessed at one point in a newly created Contact Centre, the ground floor of the Civic Offices at Union Street was remodelled and supported by a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) that provided the IT infrastructure behind the front facing service.

In 2003, the Council, along with several other district Councils, entered into a contract with Lancashire County Council for the development of a Lancashire Shared Contact Centre. However, progress of the implementation of the CRM infrastructure by the County Council was considered to too slow for this authority so Chorley opted out of the partnership and deployed Microsoft Dynamics.

Chorley’s original Contact Centre offered a small basket of services initially that was added to year by year and now has a great wealth of services that can be accessed at one point of call. The Council has achieved significant savings through the changes that have been made, and improved and sustained good performance in service delivery. ICT and Customer Services were combined in 2010, with its key driver being to promote greater digital engagement with citizens that is still paramount today.

As the Council needs to ensure that it is able to respond to continued changes and challenges in delivering high quality services against a backdrop of drastically reduced resources and increased demand, the creation of a single front office has become crucial. The proposals will build on the approach already being undertaken by the authority, but would lead to significant changes in staffing arrangements and service delivery.

It was initially envisaged that, the front office will in the main be a single, generic team of officers who manage customer contact and service requests coming into the Council from any of the primary access channels, in person, online or phone. In addition to customer and transactional processes, it will include ancillary services that support delivery of the front office. In the longer term the majority of contact will be via digital channels as more customers are migrated to online and other formats.

The migration of processes to  ...  view the full minutes text for item 15.NW2

To scope a review of the Single Front Office project for Chorley.

Members will need to consider what the desired outcome of the review will be and how this can be achieved.

It was considered that Members would benefit from shadowing customer service staff in the contact centre and the Head of Customer and Advice extended an invitation for the whole Group to attend a session for a demonstration of the software used to support front office and it was agreed that this would all need to take place before the next meeting. Members will undertake their shadowing opportunity in pairs and report back to the next meeting.

The Group discussed what additional information they would like to consider that would help to give them a better understanding of how technology will change the face of the Council over the next few years. It was considered that a meeting to look at what services where currently available online, would be advantageous to understand what services could now be completed online.

Members felt that they needed to ascertain if customer feedback was positive and asked for more detailed information in relation to the abandoned call rate to try to establish if there were any patterns being formed.

There have been improvements recently implemented for dealing with those issues from residents that are the responsibility of Lancashire County Council. Customers are now informed of how these issues/complaints have been progressed, in terms of the partner responsible and initial likely response times. This has been made easier with the introduction of the staff reporting system being made publicly available online and promotes the transparency of the Council.

The Group asked if the Council was using My Account to its full advantage and raised issues that Members faced in relation to using the system that included the reporting of multiple issues on behalf of their constituents and asked if the holding responses could be more specific and personal to the issues in hand. There was also a request to explore the possible expansion of the system to include a section for Members to store their case work so that information they wished to retain about issues could be done so in a secure way.

AGREED:

1.    That Members undertake shadowing of staff in the Contact Centre and report back to the next meeting.

2.    That the Group attend a demonstration of the IT software that supports the front office.

3.    That a demonstration of the Council’s website be undertaken to understand what services and information can be accessed online by residents and visitors to Chorley.

4.    That further detailed performance information be provided including abandoned call rates and times taken to complete tasks.

5.    That the Group undertakes a customer satisfaction survey.