During September and October 2009, Argyll and Bute, Aberdeen City, North Lanarkshire, North Ayrshire, Perth and Kinross and Dundee City Councils are piloting a new standard, the Customer Service Question Bank, across a range of services, and using differing methodologies, to check its fitness for purpose.
Following the pilot's evaluation, the intention is to launch the Customer Satisfaction Question Bank more widely across in Scotland towards the end of 2009.
The Customer Satisfaction Question Bank is:
- a set of tried and tested questions
- a defined answer scale
- based around five key drivers of customer satisfaction: delivery, timeliness, information, professionalism and staff attitude, identified by MORI in a 2004 report.
The new standard is designed to be cost effective and simple to implement; offer robustness, consistency and comparability; provide clearer indications of areas for improvement and; enable tracking of year on year changes.
The standard has emerged following research commissioned jointly in 2008 by the Improvement Service and Consumer Focus Scotland that revealed a strong appetite across Scottish local government to collaborate in the development of a common standard for customer satisfaction and experience measurement.
The development of the Customer Satisfaction Question Bank has emerged from effective collaborative working involving a number of Scottish councils, the Improvement Service, Scottish Government, Consumer Focus Scotland, Audit Scotland, LARIA in Scotland and Glasgow Housing Association.
SOLACE (Scotland) - the umbrella organisation for Scottish local government chief executives - has been strongly supportive of the move towards developing consistency and robustness to an important indicator of performance - customer satisfaction levels - in an outcomes-focused environment.
Further information
For more information, please contact Carrianne Hall (pilot co-ordinator) at the Improvement Service on 01506 775582.
