I E S E
C U S T O M E R
F O C U S
W H E E L
CASE STUDY
Winchester City Council
What are the four quadrants and how do we assess them? An iESE consultant first typically spends a few weeks collecting and analysing relevant documentation from the organisation to help assess performance in each quadrant. Overall, this comprises of around 40 different documents. Following this, a consultant will spend around a week onsite with the client. In this time they conduct interviews with a wide range of staff (these are all set up in advance). In addition, they will look at around 150 demands coming into the organisation from customers and how they are dealt with and they will also undertake an activity analysis of how a cross-section of customer service staff spend their time.
1. Customer Vision • Assessing: Is the organisation clear on its purpose? • Methods used: Much of the evidence to support this quadrant comes from the written documentation we gather, as well evaluating what we see onsite and evidence taken from our interviews with staff. • Documents analysed: This includes the council's digital strategy and customer access strategy. • Feedback: We feedback on elements such as how easy it is for the customer to interact with the organisation and whether the customer vision is really understood and acted out by employees.
2. Customer Insight Metrics • Assessing: What is the organisation measuring and how is it using these measures. • Methods used: Our Demand Analysis Tool is used to assess this quadrant. The iESE consultant listens to customer demand directly by listening into calls, sitting on reception and sometimes going out with different services. We capture information about what the customer wants, how it is dealt with, whether the contact is a value
demand (a demand for service, such as I want to know if I'm in the right Council Tax bracket) or failure demand (a demand resulting from a problem, such as bins not being collected). • Documents analysed: To support our research on Customer Insight Metrics we ask for documentation such as existing analysis demand by the council, customer feedback and budget information around the cost of customer services. • Feedback: We feedback the ratio of value and failure demands and give an indicative cost saving of cutting out failure demand in the final written report.
One local authority which has undertaken a Customer Focus Wheel analysis is Winchester City Council. iESE, working alongside the council's internal transformation team gathered significant evidence to inform the review over a one-week period. The overall results were towards the higher end of the mid-scale. The council was strongest in the areas of Customer Vision and Customer Centric Processes. In particular the council had effective customer principles in place and had also made a number of customer-focused service improvements through its Systems Thinking Reviews. However, the analysis also found - as is typical in any local authority - that a significant amount of customer demand observed was due to a failure and was therefore avoidable. The report provided a prioritised improvement plan and found significant scope to further promote existing technology to help customers ‘self serve’ (including the MyCouncil App) and to further develop more direct solutions (e.g. more integrated e-forms). This highlighted opportunities to meet the priorities in the Council’s Digital Strategy. All findings and recommendations from the report were well received and helped shape the council’s new ‘CustomerSmart’ project, which will review the customer experience across all services. “iESE’s expertise and methodology has equipped us with a range of tools that we can use to continually improve our customer experience. Whilst working with us these tools have been adapted to meet the needs of the organisation and are being used by our Transformation Team to deliver the CustomerSmart programme,” said Ellen Simpson, Winchester City Council's Corporate Head of Strategic Support. • To download the full case study, please go to: www.iese.org.uk/case-study-winchester
3. Customer Centric Processes • Assessing: Is the organisation designing everything against what matters to customers? • Methods used: For this quadrant we do things like customer journey mapping through listening into customer service calls and tracking the progress through the organisation. • Documents analysed: The documentation we ask for includes staff sickness statistics and reports on any internal reviews/improvement activity. • Feedback: Any process which doesn't add value to the customer is up for challenge. We usually find evidence of waste in processes which can be cut. This quadrant looks at things like hand offs between departments, for example, and empowering customer service staff to take ownership of enquiries through to resolution. While staff might be on their best behaviour while we are listening in, it is about the demand not the employee and how the system is set up for them to resolve customer contact.
4. Customer Service Personality • Assessing: Does the organisation have the right culture and behaviours to be a high-performing organisation? • Methods used: We get evidence for this quadrant through our interviews with staff, the information from which is entered into our Interview Template Tool, and by undertaking an activity analysis of
how staff are spending their time, which is input into our Staff Activity Analysis Tool. These tools give us automated statistics and real-time dashboards. • Documents analysed: We look for evidence in staff surveys and other relevant reviews and any analysis of how staff time is spent which has already been done by the organisation. • Feedback: By doing this work we can assess whether the right people are doing the right tasks, for example do you need highly-skilled planners to put up planning notices or are there people on the ground who could do it instead, for example.
How do we report the results? As well as a score for each of the four quadrants, iESE delivers an evidence-based written report at the end of the project which evidences what we have seen and the data we have collected and interpreted. We are also able to make recommendations for each section of how processes can be improved and are often able to share best practice of work done by other local authorities around customer service too. • To find out more visit: www.iese.org.uk/customer-focus-wheel
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