Issue - meetings

The Cabinet Member for Finance, Governance and Customer Services presented the report of the Director: Communities, Customer and Commercial Services.

The report provided an update on the Council’s Customer Feedback between 1 April 2021 and 31 March 2022 and to update Cabinet on the Council’s response to complaints during this period.

The Customer Strategy had launched in January 2021. As part of this updated strategy, Mystery Customers had been recruited to help review services from customer perspectives. In January 2022, the Council had become members of the Institute of Customer Services (ICS), which allowed benchmarking against similar organisations.

In total, there were 759 complaints received across the Council in 2021/22 from 733 complainants. This was against a backdrop of millions of service transactions that took place every week including 10.3 million bin collections and 239,837 calls to the Corporate Contact Centre each year. The total number of complaints therefore remained a small proportion of transactions.

In line with national trends, the Council had seen an increase in complaints received in 2021/22. There had been a sustained increase in compliments across the Council, the number of compliments had increased by 21% over the period.

The Council had scored 72.1 on the ICS business benchmarking survey, a strong score compared to the average for other Councils of 64.4.

Cabinet Members welcomed the report and noted that feedback was extremely valuable to enable continued development and improvement. Cabinet noted the extremely complex cases dealt with in Adult Social Care and Children’s Services and the timescales these were responded to.

RESOLVED that the Customer Feedback Report for 2021-22 in respect of Adult Statutory Complaints, Children’s Statutory Complaints and Corporate Customer Feedback and the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman Review Letter 2022 be reviewed.