Wokingham council gets private sector recognition for email contact

Private sector companies are beating a path to a borough council's door following its success in a benchmarking survey for email customer service. WH Smith, British Airways and Royal Bank of Scotland have all visited Wokingham borough council in the Thames Valley after it took top ranking in the 2011 top 50 call centres for customer service programme. Other visitors to Wokingham have included Dacorum, Guildford, Runnymede, Kingston and Windsor & Maidenhead councils. Wokingham achieved an overall 96% rating in the top 50 benchmark, which is based on a programme of mystery shopping with the overall measure of performance based on a weighted scorecard, made up of key drivers of satisfaction. The council took top ranking in 2011, having been 9th in 2009 and 8th in 2010. The council said its use of technology has allowed it to manage its email communication most effectively. The authority has opted for a social platform from LiveOps to hold all its customer contacts in one location. This allows it to easily see all the interactions it has had with its local customers irrespective of channel. Wokingham quality assures all the emails that it sends out, and argues that the technology it uses allows it to do so quickly and efficiently to ensure a consistent response to its customers. Within the system it also utilises templates and 'snippets' (key pieces of information that can be inserted into the email response), which has reduced response times and ensures that citizens get a consistent response. The council said the problems that are often identified by private sector organisations visiting it to learn more about its email systems are often that there is no co-ordination of emails, or visibility from a supervisor point of view of what the staff have sent, or ability to check a communication before it is issued. Wokingham uses a dashboard that allows it to view any email that has been processed or even ones that are currently being worked on. Sarah Barrow, Wokingham's head of customer services and administration, said: "The public sector is often portrayed as old fashioned, slow moving and resource heavy. The reality is actually very different. Within Wokingham, we have utilised the very latest technology to ensure we are mirroring our customers contact habits - social media, webchat, or smartphone apps - and are engaging with them using their channel of choice. "The private sector is now seeing this shift and is coming to us for advice. It's nice to be a pioneer although we often have to do it on a shoestring. For us the adversity of financial austerity has given us a driver for change and has bred innovation. "We think it's great that the private sector sees us as a beacon of good practice. Hopefully now some of those stereotypes about the public sector, and councils in particular, may be about to change." Wokingham's Top 5 tips for email customer service are: • Invest in technology that delivers lean processes and efficient customer management of all channel interaction. • Be proactive and personalise your service by allowing customers to sign up for updates on issues they are interested in. You can then tell them the answer before they ask the question. • Don't be frightened to interact using social media. Customers will say what they like anyway, it's how you respond that determines whether your reputation goes up or down (this may not be specifically email related but it is still important). • Ensure that all your email responses are consistent but try wherever possible to personalise the response so that it does not come across as 'manufactured' - customers like to feel that you are responding to them as individuals. • Spend time to get the basics right and quality assure your responses. An email response with poor grammar and spelling that does not properly answer the customer's enquiry will not only damage the organisation's reputation but will often lead to follow-up emails and avoidable contact. Michael Larner, senior analyst at public sector market intelligence firm Kable, said: "Wokingham's ability to assimilate all the different channels that residents are using to communicate with the council, while retaining a single view of the citizen, should be replicated by other councils. Alternatively, Wokingham should consider marketing itself as a centre of excellence and manage this activity on behalf of other councils." This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates on news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Guardian Government Computing network here.