Customer Service Standards
These standards will be applied across all first points of contact within Social Care public offices, and also within the Communications Unit at County Hall.
All staff are committed to providing the best services we can to you, our customers. As part of this we are keen that, when you contact us - by telephone or when you visit our offices – our responses to you are of the highest quality. We, therefore, offer our commitment to you as follows –
Telephone enquiries
When we answer the telephone at any of our reception points or public offices we will:
- Answer all calls within 6 rings.
- Greet you politely
- Deal with all calls in a helpful and sensitive manner.
- Whenever possible, check that the person you need to speak to is available before we put your call through.
- Ensure any recorded messages are clear and easy to understand and only use answerphones out of normal office hours.
- Apologise to you if you feel our call handling has gone wrong in some way.
- When the operator is busy dealing with another call, your call will still be answered within 6 rings, but you may hear a recorded message asking you to hold the line.
- When you are holding, the operator will come back to you every 30 seconds to keep you informed.
- If you have been holding for more than 3 minutes, we will offer you other options, (for example, putting you through to a clerk so you can leave a message).
Face-to-face enquiries
When you visit our offices in person we will :
- Greet you in a warm and friendly manner.
- If the receptionist is busy on the phone when you arrive, she/he will acknowledge that you are waiting to be seen.
- Deal with you as quickly as we can and listen carefully to what you tell us.
- Give you an estimated waiting time and keep you informed of any delays.
- Will try to ensure that we use your preferred method of communication (e.g. BSL, interpreters etc).
- If you do not need our services we will re-directly you clearly to where you need to go, giving you numbers and directions if necessary.
- Make a telephone available to you, for urgent matters, free of charge.
- Ensure our reception areas are clean and tidy, and are well stocked with up-to-date information.
Providing you with information
If we need to send you information following your telephone calls or face-to-face enquiries, we will :
- Ensure the information is accurate, up-to-date and relevant to your enquiry.
- Provide it in an appropriate format and language.
- Ensure that it is sent out the same day, or at least, within 24 hours.
- If there is a delay with this, we will let you know why and tell you when you will receive the information you have asked for.
Monitoring
We want to make sure all this works well. Therefore our managers will check this regularly and will:
- Tell all our staff what is expected of them and train/support them to do this well.
- Telephone all local offices regularly to check that all calls are being answered within 6 rings.
- Telephone all local offices regularly to check that our staff are giving a polite and informative greeting.
- Regularly observe the way in which our receptionists do their job when dealing with telephone calls and personal callers.
- Listen to suggestions and complaints and make improvement where we can
- Produce posters and other information telling staff and the public what our standards are. These will be clearly on display in every local office.
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