Scots wae hae

June 15, 2010

Less of a Robert Burns rant than a tribute to our colleagues in Scotland who have developed a united front on citizen satisfaction. OK, they still insist on calling those that public services deal with “customers”, but at least they’re focused in on their satisfaction, as I’ve reported before on satisfaction in June 2008 and later in November 2008.

On the 9th June the Improvement Service with Customer Focus Scotland and the Local Authorities Research & Intelligence Association launched the  Customer Service Measurement Tool at COSLA in Edinburgh. The event was reported on in The Scotsman newspaper the following day.

I can’t say much more since the Community of Practice at IDeA is restricted to Scottish public bodies, which is fair enough, but it apparently will help to:

  • Measure customer satisfaction in a consistent, robust and comparable way
  • Target resources where improvements are needed
  • Support intelligent benchmarking
  • Provide robust and credible evidence to scrutiny bodies
  • Save time and money on developing your own survey solution

    • This is done using:

    • Full questionnaire: 22 scaled questions & 1 open-ended question
    • Abbreviated questionnaire: 12 scaled questions & 3 open-ended questions
    • Delivery; Timeliness; Information; Professionalism; Staff Attitude; Satisfaction

    A bit over complex for my tastes but all the same –

    Well done Scotland.

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    Scotland seeks satisfaction

    November 1, 2008

    Having posted recently upon the number of seemingly separate citizen satisfaction projects, I find another from the Improvment Service in Scotland! They have just published a report entitled “Improving the understanding of customer satisfaction & experience in Scottish local government.”

    Although I don’t always agree with the conclusions drawn in the report, it does analyse the terms used, in contrast to the English Cabinet Office reports. This means that it considers what ‘satisfaction’, ‘experience’ and ‘opinion’ refer to, along with explaining why its chooses to use the term ‘customer’, as opposed to ‘citizen’. Importantly this is as much a work in progress, with an examination of current practice being presented along with some advisory measures to improve service.

    The same week also sees another document appearing on MyCustomer.com, “Service service, service: the new public sector mantra“, which includes some excellent quotations from the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, Julie Spence, which some local and central government chiefs could learn from!  Although working in local government might provide a reality check on some of the concepts in the document.

    To add to a busy week’s reading there was an announcement by Mary Tetlow Associates that they are joining the bandwagon and promoting ‘customer insight’ at £350 a day workshops…I think the free Scottish document should be a first port of call – its excellent value and it was written by Tetlow Associates!

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    Posted by greatemancipator