Customer Service Excellence
Transportation Achieves Challenging Customer Service Standard
Liverpool City Council's Transportation Business Unit has met stringent new standards in customer service to become the first Metropolitan Highway Authority to achieve the Government's Customer Service Excellence standard.
Liverpool is only the third Highway Authority to gain this rigorous and challenging new award, which replaces the Charter Mark, and is considered much tougher and more relevant to the quality of customer service.
The Customer Service Excellence standard aims to make a tangible difference to public service users by encouraging organisations to focus on their individual needs and preferences.
An organisation must be successfully assessed against the criteria of the standard by a licensed certification body. The five criteria of Customer Service Excellence include :-
- Customer insight
- The Culture of the Organisation
- Information and Access
- Delivery
- Timeliness and Quality of Service
Steve Holcroft, Transportation Business Unit Manager, explains "The customer service framework helped to prioritise improvement activity and ensure that those improvements were focussed on our customers. Achievement of the award demonstrates that Transportation is engaging and involving our customers effectively. The award is also external recognition for the hard work, dedication and professionalism of staff."
The leadership for the improvement project was given by Mike Peet - Transportation and Development Manager.
The primary purpose of the Transportation Business Unit is to maintain and improve the transport network in Liverpool by making it safer, more accessible, efficient and attractive for the 435,500 population and visitors. Transportation delivers a wide range of services to communities across Liverpool. The services provided include road safety education and campaigns, management of traffic and assets (such as street lights, roads and traffic signals), highway development control, alleygating, public realm improvements and development of transport strategy.
Cllr Peter Millea, Executive Member for assets and developments said: "We survey 5,000 people across Liverpool every year to ask what their priorities are and how they rate the quality of service that we deliver. Our levels of satisfaction are increasing for street based services and road and pavement repairs services.
"In 2008, 58% said they were satisfied with the way we maintained roads in a good condition, which demonstrates an increase of eight per cent since 2006, and 74% were satisfied with the maintenance of street lighting, which has recorded consistently high levels and has increased by four per cent points in two years.
"We are still determined to improve and learn by listening to suggestions from our customers. Where we can we design projects to suit individual community needs such as safer routes to school, road safety education, travel planning and assistance, traffic management schemes and public realm projects. "
As part of the assessment process staff, partners and customers were involved in focus groups. The assessor was particularly impressed with the partnership working and the commitment of staff.