Customer Excellence

Customer Service Excellence encourages organisations to focus on providing efficient, excellent and equitable customer service; where the customer is at the heart. It is a certification that can only be achieved through an assessment by the Customer Service Excellence certification body.

We originally achieved the quality mark in 2018 and recently underwent a review to ensure we are still meeting the standards. The review has shown us where we have continued to do good work, where we have improved and what areas we need to continue to work on.

Of the 57 areas that we were assessed on, we were marked as ‘compliant’ for 55, meaning we met the standards needed for the Customer Service Excellence quality mark.

Our strengths

Tenant Panel: Our tenant panel meets on a regular basis; they give us feedback and help us to create services and policies that meet the needs of our tenants. The panel has become more inclusive and is now more representative of our wider tenant community. The review has shown this as a key strength, as the diversity of our panel members helps to ensure that the views of all customers can be incorporated into policy and procedures.

Scrutiny Boot Camps: Boot camps are 2-day meetings where we consult with tenants on a particular service within Linc, such as fire safety or anti-social behaviour. These meetings enable us to seek the views of our tenants and listen to your ideas. This was seen as a strength as it means that our services are driven my the needs of our customers.

Understanding Our Customers: The review showed that we are good at understanding the needs of our customers and are able to adapt our services to take account of the changing circumstances our customers experience. This includes using digital methods of providing customer service, such as social media.

Community Safety Programme: Our community safety programme was highlighted as a strength because it focuses on supporting our customers and the needs of the wider community. The assessor who carried out our review, quoted a member of staff who said’ “We live and work in these communities as do many of our family and friends, and we want to project a positive image and do an excellent job for our residents.”

Areas we will continue to improve

The assessor noted that though our staff are customer focussed we do not evaluate people’s individual and team commitment to customer service and would like us to include this in our performance management reviews.

We have also been asked to publicise our customer service information, including the timeliness of our response and the quality of our customer service. Though we monitor these internally, we will now be looking at our process and will be working with our tenants to consider how best to share this information more widely.

Achieving this quality mark is a great way for us to make sure we maintain high standards of customer service and helps us to improve.

If you are interested in joining our Tenant Panel or taking part in a Scrutiny Boot Camp meeting, get in touch, we would love to have you. Contact Karen Jeffreys on 0800 072 0966 or email: contact.centre@linc-cymru.co.uk