Customer Experience

Our Commitment

We keep the customer at the heart of what we do, with a dedicated customer experience team that works to ensure our customers' priorities are upheld across the organisation. An example of this is the customer experience strategy. This strategy is supported by us and has been a key tool to demonstrate the recognised importance of our customers.

Part of our focus is to understand the importance of feedback, both from our employees and our customers. This has taken the form of two key surveys, supported by the Institute of Customer Services (ICS) that allow us to not only gather essential feedback, but also to understand and compare how we perform when compared to other local authorities and the private sector.

• The ServCheck survey helps use to find out what our employees think about our customer service strategy.
• The Business Benchmarking survey gathers feedback from our customers on their satisfaction with the council.

These surveys have been extremely useful in the past and the feedback was used to guide our new strategy. Since the last surveys went out we have been working hard to listen and make a change.

We want as many people as possible to take part, because it's with your feedback that we can create services that anyone can use and show our commitment to customer excellence.

Our Surveys

Through our membership with the ICS, we are able to launch and annual customer and employee survey. This standardised approach means we are able to benchmark our performance against industry and private sector comparators. 

Since the 2024 Business Benchmarking Survey score of 67.1, we have recognised the need for improvement and since then, the Customer Experience Team has led a number of efforts to further promote a customer-focused approach. We hope with the next survey, releasing in July 2025, we will see the impact of our efforts reflected in the results. However, regardless of score, we are committed to improving our overall customer experience.

Our Customer Promises

As a Customer Experience team, we work hard to promote the Customer Experience Strategy and have set out key Customer Promises:

1. Pillars - We will ensure our three pillars of 'Our Leadership', 'Our People' and 'Our Delivery' that are expanded upon in the Customer Experience Strategy are consistently upheld.
2. Respect - We will treat every customer with respect and fairness.
3. Accessibility - We will remove barriers and make it easier for you to do business with us; reducing the effort it takes.
4. Communication - We will communicate clearly and with transparency
5. Engagement - We will listen to your feedback and respond quickly; getting it right the first time.
6. Customer Journeys - We will make sure to be smart when designing and improving customer journeys, making the best use of what we've got.

For further information please access the customer experience strategy linked at the top of the page.

How can you help? 

We have a number of satisfaction surveys across the organisation. If you are invited to leave your feedback, by any of our teams, please do. Regular customer feedback drives innovation and is the best way for us to know if our services are designed with you in mind and to a high standard.

The annual ICS survey launches each year in March-April. To take part, look out for our website popup, or pick up a paper copy from your local library.