Community & Business
19 February, 2023
Council customers happy with service
MORE than 18,000 customer requests were dealt with by Tablelands Regional Council in 12 months, a report has revealed.
The report sought to inform councillors as to how customer requests were handled and the process currently in place to ensure residents were kept up to date with the outcome of the requests.
According to the report, 70-80 per cent of customers were very satisfied, while only 4-6 per cent were very dissatisfied, with the most common complaints causing dissatisfaction being animal management issues.
The report revealed that cus-tomer requests were allocated across 32 work groups, 44 cat-egories, 138 request types and more than 440 sub-types.
In August 2021, council en-dorsed a Customer Experience Strategy and standards to match which outlined the commitment “to be a leading customer centric organisation, supporting custom-ers to transact and interact how they want, when they want”.
A raft of actions over the past three years were listed to show how much progress the council has made to improve their re-sponse to residents, including:
• Changing the opening hours of the Atherton customer service centre.
• Customer relations officers logging requests directly into the relevant system without requiring forms.
• Training the after hours service provider to ensure consistency in standards.
• Providing monthly reports to the leadership team on customer response performance and customer satisfaction.
• Training staff to take payments over the phone ensuring payments can be taken whenever or however the customer engages with the council.
• Reviewing all online forms and the backend process of the website, removing complexity and unnecessary fields, and
• Providing a customer satisaction survey in email responses and at the close of phone or face-to-face interactions.
“Future identified improvements include building customer application modules for certain categories (e.g. community project requests, RADF applications and events), cleansing and consolidating the existing request types and subtypes, reducing the number of customised events and preparing for an upgrade of the CRM system,” the report stated.
“This was originally scheduled for this financial year however it has been pushed back until 2024 when the updated software will be released.
“The benefits of upgrading will include the ability for customers to log and track requests directly into the CRM system, the ability for councillors to log and track customer requests on behalf of constituents, and the ability for our afterhours provider to log service requests directly into the system, providing customers with a reference number at the time of lodging a request.”
