Basingstoke & Dean Borough Council Scrutiny Committee Meeting

Councillor Bowes was replaced by Councillor McKay and Councillor Harvey was replaced by Councillor Laura James.

Apologies were received from Councillors Carruthers and Golding.  

There were no declarations of interest.

There were no urgent items

The minutes of the meetings held on 24 January 2023 and 14 February 2023 were confirmed as a correct record and signed by the Chair.

The Head of Customer Services Improvement and Performance introduced a report and set out the Draft Customer Service Experience Strategy. The committee were informed that the changing nature of customer interaction and experiences with external organisations had elevated customer expectations of interaction and delivery. The strategy was kept in close alignment with the Council’s digital strategy.

The Cabinet Member for Residents Services acknowledged that digital self-service was not right for everyone and it was important that face to face contact was maintained as an option for customers.

The committee debated the strategy and asked questions which established:

·         Complaints were analysed and learning from complaints was shared across the whole Council, not just the affected units.

·         Alternative languages to English were available to customers through the “Translate It” service. A number of contact centre staff spoke alternative language and interpreters were provided where necessary.

·         Customer feedback was sought in order to better understand what was required from customers when they interact with the Council. It was important to understand the reasons for contacting the Council, what the experience was like and how the customer’s journey could be improved.

·         Automatic acknowledgements to customer queries were in place and the 10 working-day response period remained.

·         The first phase of the new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system was due to begin in September 2023 for waste and recycling services and then parks and street scene. This included the development of tracking and customer journey notifications to update customers on the progress of their enquiry.

·         The contact centre was able to handle waste and recycling and parks and streetscene queries themselves. Where the customer query was not able to be dealt with directly, warm handovers took place with the relevant team.

·         The use of a chatbot on the Council’s website was no longer used as it did not add value to the customer experience.

·         The out of hours service was in place for key areas such as housing. Call handlers were trained to tell the caller to divert calls to 999 or 101 if necessary.

·         The new CRM system was able to give greater visibility to the customer contact centre when logging and reporting issues.

RESOLVED: The committee recommend

·         That the standard be adopted across all customer channels and access points.

·         That the website it visually accessible to all.

·         That warm handovers take place between the customer contact centre and the relevant business units.

·         That customer response times are given in working days rather than hours. 

·         That online services be made available to customers if they choose to.

The Head of IT and Digital Transformation introduced a report and set out the Council’s Digital Strategy. The committee were informed that digital transformation had accelerated and the Council’s experience of the pandemic had demonstrated the need to advance the digital transformation.

The committee debated the strategy and asked questions which established:

·         Improvements to the accessibility and utilisation of the GIS mapping system were able to assist councillors when reporting issues in their ward. This was also possible for reporting to external partners.

·         A full-time GIS officer was recruited to further improvements and this allowed councillors to access more information when undertaking ward work.

·         The base data used to inform GIS was key and that ensuring it was correct was an important part of the testing process. The system was resident-focussed and would therefore be tested with residents.

·         Moving from physical servers to cloud-based servers was being looked at as part of a climate emergency and sustainability action.

·         That members wanted to understand how they could avoid the double-reporting of issues and if GIS was able to show issues that had already been reported or already resolved.

·         The visual lines within GIS had been looked at and access on a mobile device had been explored. The extent to which certain mapping layers were available to residents had been looked at. Where there was a dependency on third party data, the ownership of that data required examination and how that data was shared was important in the making mapping publicly available.

·         Access to mapping data owned by third party organisations such as housing associations was debated by the committee and it emphasised the need for councillors and residents to be able to access certain parts of it.

RESOLVED: The committee recommend

·         That the sharing of land-ownership data with external partners be explored, particularly in relation to housing associations and councillors access to this when undertaking ward work.

·         That the targets for improvements to GIS be updated and that adequate training is provided to users.

·         That new mapping layers be added to GIS for members’ use and that a range of options be explored to best equip members.

The Chair introduced the tracker and requested that the Committee review and note the recommendations made to decision makers.

RESOLVED – To note the committee recommendation tracker.

The Chair introduced the work programme and gave a brief overview of the items that would be included on the agenda for the upcoming meetings. The committee reviewed and noted its work programme.

The first housing allocation task and finish group took place to discuss the terms of reference. Councillor Laura James presented the terms of reference to the committee.

RESOLVED –

·         To note the work programme.

·         The task and finish group reports back to the committee in six months on the approach to choice-based lettings specifically regarding families.

·         The terms of reference for the task and finish group was agreed.