Doing MORE for LESS (but how?)

At Surrey County Council, we are constantly striving to be better! And we want to be recognised by our peers, in both the private and public sectors, as leading the way. This is not triggered by threats of budget cuts or customer influence, but we saw the opportunity to think differently and build something with integrity, to foster a culture change. And we took the initiative. Our Strategy is to build Capability, Capacity and Reputation with the goal to build excellent customer focus. Taking on this proactive approach we can proudly say we have achieved: Increased Customer Satisfaction (now 92% - was 66%) Decreased Cost to serve (now £375.20 - was £749.08) Increased Volume (up to 200%) Increased Morale (now 63% - was 48%) Figure 1. Striving for excellence. Driving down costs, increasing customer satisfaction and activities. (click to enlarge) With a savings target of £50 million, Surrey County Council Shared Service Centre was established, to cope with the complex and demanding environment of decreasing budgets, increased pressures on efficiencies, and growing customer expectation. Formed in 2007, efforts were being made towards our saving target. Our aim was to continue to provide a high-quality service while maximising value for money. So, in April 2013, our partnership with East Sussex began. By merging transactional and corporate support services provided by the two councils, we could share resources and best practices to further strive for those savings. Our customer base is large, diverse and complex. We: Serve over 35,000 employees, including staff from over 300 schools. Employees range from roads teams to social workers to IT specialists and fire crews and everything in between. Provide a payroll bureau service to just under 100,000 employees, including East Sussex, Academies, Colleges, and after school clubs. Deal with over 7,000 suppliers. Pay over 18,000 pensioners. Provide a Local Assistance Scheme for the entire Surrey council area, to bring in funds. With so many stakeholders to mange and engage with and differing attitudes and levels of resistance, we developed a model to help us recognise and react to the types of challenges we would face. Embedding Customer Service Excellence within each team and within each process resulted in a transformed culture within 5 years. What did we do? In 2010, a customer strategy team was set up with steps to define and drive strategy, and two analysts to look at the data we were starting to collect. The team’s first tasks were to undertake benchmarking activity and coordinate the external assessment of our Customer Service. We also utilised Champions within the Shared Services teams. This ensured that all teams were engaged and involved, especially with the key task of identifying all our customers – both external and internal; all with different needs wants and priorities. Additionally, rather than telling customers what we are going to do for them and then showing them the final product or process, we bring them on the journey with us and involve them at each stage. Transparency and customer feedback are key ingredients to ensure that assumptions aren’t made and the right message is being relayed. It is important for us to ensure that realistic expectations are set and understood. Although recognising the above measures were important in pursuing excellence in customer services, we also identified additional techniques and methods that contributed to fostering a culture that is truly customer focused: Lean – A methodology to determine where the waste in our processes was. Customer Journey Mapping – To understand the stages of our processes that were important and/or painful for customers. PRINCE2 projects team – To ensure control of projects is retained, so that implementations align with priorities, including customer service. CSE Standard – Used as a driver of continuous improvement, as a skills development tool and as an independent validation of achievement. We adapted the Ulrich model to suit our business needs and purpose to handle customer enquiries. This channelled first point contact for general enquiries to our web pages and self-service. These web pages cover process, policy and self serve forms for certain actions, as well as outline all our processes. If customers are unable to locate the right information, their next point of contact is through our helpdesk. The helpdesk receives over 115, 000 calls a year and has a first point fix rate of 87%, meaning that only a small proportion of calls are passed on to the second line teams. The graph below (Figure 2) depicts the streamlined contact process our customers go through, showing the larger proportions of queries are resolved at Tier 0 and 1, our High quality Self Serve and Helpdesk: Figure 2. Solving enquiries quicker. With a first point fix rate of 87%, delighting customers and reducing our costs. (click to enlarge) Innovation for us came from a drive to combine our responsibilities and budget constraints as a public sector shared services with the approach and best practices of a more commercial organisation. We bring the ethos and social responsibilities of the council and blend them with the purpose and culture of a customer focused entity. "It was impressive in the way Shared Services and the Team on My Helpdesk have approached this service though partnership working with organisations such as Citizens Advice Bureau and also how engagement and obtaining feedback from user’s and stakeholders of the service which has directly influenced service design." Gary Baker, Lead Auditor of Customer Service Excellence, South East Outcomes Over the 4 years we have been accredited to the CSE standard, as shown in the graph below, we have achieved from 93% with 2 compliance plus marks in 2010 to 100% and 2 compliance plus achievements in our most recent assessment. With each yearly assessment to the Customer Service Excellence standard, our rating has improved alongside Customer Satisfaction scores: Figure 3. External Benchmarking.Driving continuous improvement, adopting and shaping industry good practise. (click to enlarge) The original aim of adopting the Customer Services focus was to utilise it as an improvement tool and identify services and processes that needed review and change The end result has been much greater than anticipated, with costs reduced alongside increased capacity – all whilst customer satisfaction improved. It is no coincidence that during this time, our employee morale has increased dramatically. This comes from our employees working in an environment where their customers are happy and their managers engage and listen to them about how improvements can be introduced. We have ownership of the service we deliver; we take pride in it and have built a strong reputation of being an organisation that delivers. The impact of having customer service at the heart of what we do has enabled us to shine a light on our systems and processes and uncover what simply does not work and what actually works really well. Furthermore, by instilling a customer centric ethos and venturing into a partnership with East Sussex, it has meant that together we could deliver: £700,000 savings to public purse. Smooth TUPE process of 38 members across to SCC, allowing us to protect local jobs and avoid redundancy costs. Negotiate 44 supplier contracts. We have held a mirror up to ourselves as well as other organisations; made connections, shared practices, lessons and feedback on what our people think of what we do and what we could do. [eventpdf]

Doing MORE for LESS (but how?)

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