Newark DC - Advice Manual

Customer Advice Manual

Newark and Sherwood District Council is on a journey to improve the way they serve customers. The Council recently adopted a new vision and set of priorities which put the customer at the heart of service delivery.

 

Phil Ward, Newark and Sherwood District Council explains more.

 

How we dealt with enquiries

The Advice Officers at Newark Town Hall could provide customers with very general advice. Tthe officers had some knowledge of most council services although there would be many times when they would need to contact the appropriate service to obtain more detailed advice.

One particular officer had, over time, developed a wider range of knowledge on most of the council services. This officer, if available, could provide the customer with a ‘one stop’ approach to service delivery. This skill was however limited to this officer and their knowledge was not always up to date. In the event that this officer was unavailable customers had to wait or return at a quieter time.

 

The issue

The obvious issues with our approach were:

  • The widest knowledge was limited to a single officer and in the absence of this officer the service did not provide a comprehensive and consistent front line service.
  • The staff were not always kept up to date with changes to practice, approach or council policy by the services they provided advice for.
  • The manual forms and leaflets held by the Advice Office were, at times, out of date, of poor quality and sometimes unavailable.
  • The method of recording the visit type and production of analysis was labour intensive.

 

The need for change

To ensure that we provided a more reliable and consistent level of service we realised that we not only needed to share the knowledge amongst the other officers but we needed to have a mechanism for keeping staff informed of changes to approach/policy and to have a knowledge base that was accessible by all, at all times.

We also considered that by enhancing the remit of the other staff (who mainly provided a cashiering role) that we could increase the number of staff that provided advice to customers.

In order to improve the service to our customers we decided to consolidate all the advice and information that we provided to customers into a single ‘on-line’ guide that could be accessed by not only staff within Newark Town Hall, but at all Council locations.

We worked with Destin Solutions to assist us not only in developing/structuring the ‘on-line guide’ but also to gather the information/advice that we provided to customers.

 

Destin’s approach was:

  • To conduct interviews with the Advice Officers to obtain the current advice provided to our customers. This was a lengthy process as we took the decision to include, from the start, all 43 of the council services.
  • Provide access to the ‘draft’ guide to all staff within the Council in order to validate and comment on the content. By involving the other services we felt that it would identify additional areas of advice that the front line staff could provide.
  • Create a library of frequently asked questions that is available instantly to advisers.

 

The outputs of the project were:

  • Recommendations on how service delivery could be improved.
  • Suggested additional areas that the ‘on-line’ guide should include to supplement the advice (e.g. useful contacts, links to useful websites, etc)
  • The development of nteractive ‘web tools’ to assist in providing advice (on-line calculators).
  • Incorporation of a ‘google’ like search function to enable us to quickly find the information required.
  • Links to electronic versions of forms and leaflets – this ensures that staff always issue the most up to date forms and that unnecessary stocks were not retained in the office.
  • Incorporation of links into an existing 'back office'procedure manual which Destin Solutions developed and support for us. As we had already invested in this product we felt that in linking the two applications together that we could provide the Advice Officers with not only answers to their enquiries but also access to further detail on relevant subjects.

 

Outcome

We now have an ‘on-line’ advice guide that is accessible to not only our Customer Services Team but also to the whole Authority. Now when a customer contacts the Council the first port of call for our staff is to check the guide for how to deal with the issue, who to contact and the action to take. If the action requires a form to be completed the Advice Team print the required form directly from the application.

In developing the guide we also took the opportunity to incorporate an on-line form which our front line staff complete, in order to track and report on our avoidable/unavoidable contact. We had initially intended to manually record and correlate this information, but we felt that this was a natural extension to the guide, this has provided a significant efficiency saving.

 

How we have changed

The development and introduction of the advice guide has meant that our customers can now receive the same level of advice from all our staff at all our advice offices. It has also:

  • Reduced the number of internal telephone calls that we need to make to the back office teams, which in turn reduces the time a customer needs to be with an Advice Officer, which in turn means we can deal with more customers during the day.
  • Resulted in an increase in the number of staff that customers can obtain advice from. This means a reduction in waiting time for customers and means we can deal with more customers during the day.
  • Meant that we no longer need to keep stocks of paper forms, we now simply print the forms as and when required.

 

For further information on this innovative product and our approach to service delivery contact either Phil Ward at Newark & Sherwood District Council (Phil.Ward@newark-sherwooddc.gov.uk) or Duncan Baxter at Destin Solutions (duncan.baxter@destin.co.uk)