So how good are customer services at the York Council?

A report to a council committee meeting next week praises the progress made in improving customer reception facilities. 94% of users says they are satisfied with the contact centre, an improvement on previous years.

The time taken to answer telephone calls (they had 244,277 last year) has improved while the number of residents visiting the West Offices offices has fallen from 141,556 to 112,893. Visitors wait on average for 7.2 minutes.

Business visitor numbers have also reduced.

The Council say this change is due to more people using “on line” and “auto payment” systems. These systems are cheaper for the authority to operate and should be available 24/7.

But the experience of those using “on line” services is very mixed.

The report says, “From October 2016 residents have been encouraged to complete certain transactions online. As an example – since November – 2,454 street light and street cleansing issues were reported with 1,315 (55%) of these now being logged by residents online”.

However, these are pretty much the only issues that you can report “on line” with an expectation that you will actually get a response.

The roll out of issue reporting on other services has stalled.

For the third year in a row the Council has been unable to say how long it takes to deal with electronic communications nor does the report say what customer satisfaction levels are with this contact channel.

Sooner or later the Council will have to come clean on why some of its web based customer contact systems are such a shambles.

York Council web site crashes again

Not for the first time, the Council’s web site has been unavailable to residents this weekend.

The Council was heavily criticised a few weeks ago when it failed to use social media effectively to keep residents up to date on progress being made following a similar loss of service.

Now no one has even bothered to put a note on their Facebook page or to use “Twitter“

It is an important issue as many residents seek to use the online functions – for example to pay bills – at the weekend when they have spare time available.

It is also the cheapest way for the Council to process contact with its customers.

Sadly the failure is all to typical of the Councils muddled priorities

West Office customer service wobbling

The loss of the York Council’s Acomb Office continues to put pressure, on reception facilities at West Offices, two years after its closure.

This is how customer services at West Offices are now performing.

In person at West Offices

West Office reception stats

Only about 80% of customers are currently being seen within 10 minutes of arrival. This is however an improvement on 2013.

Telephone

Only 40% of those telephoning the Council can expect to be answered within 20 seconds.

Around 25,000 telephone calls are made to the Council each month.

The Council blames peaks in call volumes – such as those caused by the Lendal bridge fine refund process – for the poor performance.

Telephone call performance

More staff have been recruited to bolster the service.

The last Council meeting was also told that “service provision will be enhanced by the introduction of the new voice server in the new year which will seek to serve callers better than the current version does with improved accuracy, and better information giving facilities including call waiting times.

In April we will also have a new web site in place that will also help customers in providing information they have told us they want to see. This will be followed by the implementation of a new customer system which will be easier for our residents to use on-line when, booking, applying or paying for services”

The one crumble of comfort for the York Council are the results of a satisfaction survey of those customers contacting them by telephone during the summer.

The figures show that over 90% rated the response as “Very Good or Excellent”.

Emails

Ironically the longest delays occur on electronic communications with Emails sometime not being processed for over 2 weeks.

This despite the priority for the Councils customer handling to be electronically based as it is the cheapest access channel to administer.

The Council admits they have failed on this important project

“The current system does not currently provide data on the completed time for emails against service level, this would have to be a manual calculation on each case. The current service level is within 24hours however as a result of the uplift in contact as mentioned below and reduced resource availability we have not met this timescale for some”.

The last Council meeting was told that the Email backlog would be eliminated by the middle of October and that responses would then be issued within 24 hours

Speed in initially acknowledging a contact from a customer is, of course, only the first step towards success.

Residents need to be convinced that, having reported an issue, it has been remedied.

……..& there the York Council still has a huge amount to do to improve its reputation!