…Where possible, any customer who comes into contact with Scottish Councils should have their service delivered, their problem resolved, or their question answered at the first point of contact.  This means no unnecessary form filling, no asking for information that has already been given, no unnecessary referrals to other members of staff or other organisations…

Customer First will help to develop public services where:

• Customers will have a choice in how they transact with Council Services - by phone, face-to-face, online or at home (where appropriate).
• A national training programme will develop multi-skilled Customer Service Staff who can deal with a wide range of service requests from the front office.
• The most frequently requested - core - services will be targeted for improvement: 46 services have been identified with Councils.
• Customers who telephone a local authority should have their call answered first time (some councils have already set a 95% target for this).
• Customers will have the majority - 75% - of their core service requests dealt with at first contact.
• Improved business processes will reduce transaction times and costs, with business process maps being produced for major services.
• Customers whose calls need to be referred will not have to repeat their details. A single electronic customer record - a citizen's account (CA) - will provide the facilities to monitor transactions against the account, and the relevant staff - via a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system - will have immediate access to those transaction details.
• Along with the citizen's account, there will be an opportunity to have a single entitlement card (smartcard), which can replace the many and incompatible schemes that currently exist. The first roll out of the card will support the new national concessionary fares scheme.
• Along with their citizen's account, customers will have a secure public services network to ensure that changes to basic (life-event) circumstances - address change, name change, notification of death - will be accurately and securely handled, e.g. neither grief or public embarrassment will be caused by sending correspondence to the wrong person, the wrong address, or to someone who is deceased.
• Through a common A-Z of public services, the Scottish Executive, in partnership with Councils, will promote and encourage the take up of online-self-service customer transactions, including authenticated transactions, authenticated access to services and the facilities for customers themselves to update their citizen's account.
• Develop common standards and targets for measuring and publishing customer satisfaction ratings (some Councils have already set 95% as the baseline measure).