Corporate report

Coal Authority Customer Strategy 2019 to 2023

Published 7 July 2022

1. Introduction

In 2018, our customer team was created to ensure that the customer aspects of our 5 year business plan could be delivered. Over the past 12 months, our customer team have done a lot of work alongside staff, using insight and feedback from our customers and partners. In 2019 we used this feedback to launch a new customer strategy that set out our plans to improve customer service across all parts of the organisation.

2. Vision

Our vision to become an established customer orientated organisation will deliver the best end to end experiences for our customers internally and externally.

Our customer strategy will set the future direction for a consistent customer experience delivered through:

• best practise
• customer co-creation
• an insight led approach

2.1 Actions and Analysis

Actions we have taken in the last 12 months include:

• internal reviews across departments to better understand who are customers are, how they interact with us and what feedback we collect from customers
• mapping out customer journey’s to understand customer experiences and interactions
• becoming members of the Institute of Customer Service
• publishing ‘Customer First’ article in Modern Law Magazine
• conducting our first customer experience survey internally and externally
• evaluating the knowledge of our newer staff around what we do and how we do it - creating employee advocacy
• implemented project group for customer accessibility – to enable better access to services for all our customers
• incorporating ‘customer focused wording’ into all job descriptions and adopted customer skills and experience into future job adverts
• developing new customer standards using input from staff workshops, feedback from partners and customer insight
• implemented a central system for capturing complaint information and re-written our complaints process making it clearer for our customers
• working with learning and development to design customer service training, customer-centric design thinking training and incorporating customer approach into leadership training

Our customers are interested in what we do, they want experiences with our products, services and interactions that are seamless, responsive and consistent. To meet those needs we need to get closer to our customers, understand their expectations and develop better experiences for them.

3. Strategy

Our Customer Strategy is focused around 3 core pillars – Customer Culture, Digital Integration and Customer Experience and will set the future direction for a consistent customer experience delivered through:

• best practise
• customer co-creation
• an insight led approach

4. Customer culture

We want a ‘One Coal Authority’ approach to customer which is consistent with our Mission, Purpose and Values and where all our staff understand our commitment to giving great customer service, know why this is important to how we do our work and are confident in how to deliver it.

Confidence across our teams is improving through the implementation of our people plan, equality, diversity and inclusivity approach and learning and development strategy as well as our customer work over the past year and communicating more about our customers. We do some fantastic work for customers and communities and we want to continue to build on these foundations more consistently across the organisation.

4.1 Immediate actions:

The immediate actions are:

• our customer standards have been finalised and will be launched in October
• we’ll be sharing our customer survey feedback with the business and delivering training on ‘getting the basics right’
• we’ll be sharing great examples of our positive customer interactions and using our values customer new recognition policy to recognise staff for positive customer service

5. Digital Integration

Our approach to customer service will be suitable for the digital age and embrace the technology available to better engage with our customers, optimise efficiencies in our processes and transform our services by making them more accessible for all.

Our digital customer offer varies across our website platform; a large proportion of our customers find it easy to order a mining report through our self-serve ordering platform, whilst some of our services could be made more accessible for customers to use. Our social media presence has also increased over the last year bringing opportunities to increase the visibility of our work and the range of ways that our customers can engage with us and provide feedback.

5.1 Immediate actions:

The immediate actions are:

• we will make online PDFs accessible so our customers can better self-serve
• we will create automated acknowledgements for central mailboxes to reduce effort and provide consistent responses to customers informing them of our customer standard service levels
• our Digital Programme Board will consider all decisions from a customer perspective

6. Customer Experience

We want to provide a positive customer experience to all those who engage with us. To do that our work will be informed by customer insight and feedback. We will be clear about what our customers can expect from us and how to get in touch. We will do what we say we will and use feedback to continue to improve.

Using customer insights to shape our work in a structured way is new to us. Our review shows that very few processes have been designed with the customer in mind which means that we can make things easier for them and reduce inefficiencies in the business at the same time. Some internal processes are unnecessarily complicated and have different standards for different customers.

6.1 Immediate actions

The immediate actions are:

• we will improve our communications and signposting so it’s easier for our customers to speak to the right person
• we have developed a new customer complaints and commendations policy which is will be published on our website, this will be supported by a central system which will allow us to monitor response times, escalation frequency, themes and trends so that we can maximise learning
• we will implement a customer feedback tool to capture what our customers are saying

6.2 Over the next twelve months

The customer strategy is intrinsic to every part of the business and we will continue to develop further our understanding of our customers’ needs as well as developing our customer focused culture. This will demonstrate to our staff and our customers that we are committed to improving the customer experience.

In the initial stages we will:

• develop our knowledge, skills and awareness of our customers with 3 new training programmes; customer service training, customer centric design thinking and supporting customer who complain - customer service will also be woven into the leadership programme and will be delivered in conjunction with our external partners
• design and deliver a customer service competency framework which provides a continuous platform of customer service skills, helping to identify skill gaps and enabling new career paths
• continue to work in partnership with Government Digital Service to give our customers greater access to all of our website services so that customers can better self-serve and provide support to those customers that need us most
• embed our improved complaints process and develop a persistent complainants process
• start to simplify our processes by identifying areas which are manual based or are working inefficiently
• begin to map our customer journeys prioritising those which are causing the highest pains for our customers and will add the most value in terms of customer experience
• investigate the option of a CRM system solution to be able to capture and share customer information enabling cohesive working across the organisation and providing a seamless customer experience
• share our customers stories and feedback through communications, implementing a feedback tool and generating a sharing feedback culture

7. We know we will have succeeded when

We know we will have succeeded when:

• we have an established customer orientated culture where decisions are made with the customer in mind
• our customer strategy amplifies the visibility of our brand so that our customers know more about whom we are and what we do
• we consistently manage the customer’s expectation in a positive and supportive way
• customer journeys are consistent and seamless across all channels of interaction
• our internal systems allow cohesive sharing of customer information
• we have embedded the continuous use of customer insight and user research to develop our products and improve our services
• we will be a customer led organisation, where measuring our customer experience is considered business as usual
• our customer standards connect us internally to deliver to our customer expectations externally

We will continue to learn from other organisations and develop as we grow.

8. Customer strategy timeline

Between 2019 and 2021:

• the Customer Strategy implemented and CSI role embedded into the business
• investigate customer feedback for capturing, measuring and sharing insights
• develop consistent customer experiences through refined processes and improvements in journeys
• design and deliver a suite of customer service training programmes
• customer standards identified and adopted within our culture
• design and deliver a customer service competency framework for skills development and career progression
• develop digital accessible platforms and streamline with other channels of customer interaction
• employees are recognised for customer service

Between 2021 and 2022:

• organisational structure delivers the best for our customers
• continue development of customer service skills through leadership training
• embed consistency customer approaches through communications, language, products and services and best practise across the business
• build a continuous platform for co - creation with our customers
• best practise methods adopted across the organisation
• customer Satisfaction measures are embedded and drive positive behaviours
• develop centralisation of customer information for cohesive sharing of customer data (CRM)

Between 2022 and 2023:

• established customer centric organisation with a customer focused culture
• we are accredited for customer service
• clear seamless customer journeys generate positive customer satisfaction and engagement scores
• customer satisfaction scores are top in our sectors industry
• culture is a great place to work
• develop customer personas to add personalisation and value to customer experiences
• customer testimonials capture their experiences