Customer Access Improvement service

The Customer Access Improvement Service was launched by Socitm Insight in partnership with GovMetric in 2008. The service enables councils to measure and benchmark their performance on customer satisfaction and value for money across the three main customer access channels of web, phone and face to face.

Citizens and businesses will judge the quality of public services they receive by each contact they have with a public sector employee or organisation
- Sir David Varney, Service transformation: A better service for citizens and businesses, a better deal for the taxpayer

The service has three components that provide the greatest value when used together:

GovMetric is an automated method of capturing and reporting the quality of customer interactions with a local- authority. The service covers web, phone and face-to-face channels, allowing the performance of different channels and different services to be compared.

Channel value benchmarking is a service to enable local authorities to identify the true cost of providing access to services via web, phone and face-to-face and to compare these costs with those recorded by other comparable councils.

The Website take-up service is a web exit survey that provides detailed information about:
the services being sought, user experience, how users would have contacted the council if not by the website and whether they will use the website in future. Results are benchmarked against comparable council websites.

Whether the customer buys into one or all of these components, they will also have access to:

CAIS reports: a biannual publication featuring results from all the component services as well as articles on topics related to customer access, channel management, contact management and management of web, phone and face-to-face channels.

CAIS consultancy services: these are available to support customer access performance improvement planning and implementation.

CAIS subscriber workshops: biannual one day events featuring presentations and discussion around the results from each service, with contributions fro outside speakers on topics related to customer access and channel management. The events will stimulate networking, best practice exchange, subscriber discussion and feedback.

Upcoming events

• 8 June launch workshop of Channel value benchmarking - Group 4 (London)          
• 9 June - half-yearly workshop for Website take-up service customers (Birmingham)
• 16 September results workshop of Channel value benchmarking - Group 4 (London)   

Past events (2009)

• 21 April - launch workshop of Channel value benchmarking - Group 2 (London)
• 2 June - half-yearly workshop for Website take-up service (London)
• 22 July- results workshop of Channel value benchmarking - Group 2 (London)
• 16 September - launch workshop of Channel value benchmarking - Group 3 (London)
• 2 December - half-yearly workshop for Website take-up service and other CAIS customers (Birmingham)

Past events (2010)

• 22 January- results workshop of Channel value benchmarking - Group 3 (London)

Further information about events is published in the Events section of this website and also mailed to Website take-up service, Channel value benchmarking and GovMetric subscribers.

If you are not a subscriber and would like to attend one of these events please contact insight@socitm.net