News: Can't Get No Satisfaction

Recently, ICD and Servicetick presented a real-time solution for collecting customer feedback via IVR technology based on the CSMT tool all Scottish Councils were introduced to at a seminar hosted at COSLA HQ Edinburgh.

The CSMT is a tracking tool that the Improvement Service is suggesting be introduced across Scottish Councils.  Apart from getting feedback from service users, Councils would then have a means of benchmarking their satisfaction levels against other public sector bodies who use it.  Incredible as it may seem, not all public bodies routinely measure customer satisfaction at this time.

Clearly a number of drivers are now in place - not least the announced cuts in funding for public sector bodies - which should lead to a much closer scrutiny of spending on services and their fitness for purpose, and as part of this, the level of satisfaction from users. The proposed Customer Satisfaction Measurement Tool (CSMT for short) is not ground-breaking in itself but is an indicator of areas that may or may not "satisfy" service users.  It does not provide any indication of the gap between the experience and customer expectations. 

There was a thought that Council frontline service staff could conduct the surveys, hence reducing the need to engage objective, external, professional researchers (considered to be an efficiency) however a pilot doing just that revealed that a considerable number of hours to collect a sample of data may not provide a huge saving (or presumably the quality and sustainability of results over time.)  This is where we thought that Servicetick has an edge - via telephone or web-based - the Servicetick consul can provide feedback in real-time, including verbatim feedback digitally transcribed and provided on the desktop of service managers.  Not only does this reduce research bias (as customer select themselves to be involved in the survey), it also means that customers provide the information in their own time without the need for staff time. The consul provides an efficient means of analysing data and provides a dashboard report, updated on a realtime basis.