Agenda item

        CABINET REVIEWED AND APPROVED

(1)  The draft Customer Strategy completed in phase one.

        RESOLVED TO RECOMMEND

(2)  Approved the outline plan for phase two implementation and recommends to Council the drawdown from reserves of £150,000 to complete the phase 2 work.

(3)  Approved the principle of a new Head of Transformation post to lead the on-going transformational change programme, including the Customer Strategy, and recommends to Council the drawdown from reserves of £180,000 to fund the post.

Decision

(1)  Reviews and approves the draft Customer Strategy completed in phase one.

(2)   Approves the outline plan for phase two implementation and recommends to Council the drawdown from reserves of £150,000 to complete the phase 2 work.

(3)  Approves the principle of a new Head of Transformation post to lead the on-going transformational change programme, including the Customer Strategy, and recommends to Council the drawdown from reserves of £180,000 to fund the post.

Corporate Objectives:

Ensuring efficient, effective and modern service delivery

Statutory Officer Comments

Monitoring Officer

As noted in the report, a procurement process to be conducted in accordance with the Council’s procurement standing orders, must be followed when procuring consultants for the phase 2 work.

S151 Officer

These projects require one-off funding of £330k over the next 2 years to ensure these transformational projects can be delivered.

As the financial requirement is one off in nature and the project aims to deliver change improvements these funds will be drawn down from the Management of Change Reserve.

Advice

JNason introduced the report and advised this report requests that Cabinet reviews and approves the strategy that completes part of phase 1 which is appendix 1, also an outline plan for phase 2 implementation and the funds that are required to complete work and the principle that the Head of Transformation post is recruited to oversee this and other parts of the transformation programme. To summarise the work that had been undertaken to date and the next steps, the draft strategy which they seek to implement across the council. The vision was co-developed with staff and shared with members before Christmas with an activity analysis. The contact points had been mapped for customers across the organisation and alongside technology that had been assessed. Essentially what phase 2 would do was embed that vision and strategy and work alongside them for requirements and ultimately the procurement of a customer relationship management tool to support with the front line facing services.

Cllr Griffiths said she thought this was a good strategy, which cover all the bases that they’d been looking at for quite a few years and pulling it all together. She would be relived and excited when the council get a CRM system, which they had been talking about for a very long time. She knows that they do already split out so they know how many MP enquiries they get but she requested that in future they would be able to know how many councillor enquiries they get as she thought that would be useful information to feed into the whole of this strategy, looking at complaints or compliments that they are getting. She said that would be a useful tool.

JNason said that she would include that in her piece of work, a CRM system where they can include councillor enquiries as well as MP and FOI’s. The idea is that it would capture the background information for officers to respond so that they can then report on management information where it is captured.

Cllr Anderson said that he thought this was a good improvement.

Recommendation agreed

        CABINET REVIEWED AND APPROVED

(4)  The draft Customer Strategy completed in phase one.

        RESOLVED TO RECOMMEND

(5)  Approved the outline plan for phase two implementation and recommends to Council the drawdown from reserves of £150,000 to complete the phase 2 work.

(6)  Approved the principle of a new Head of Transformation post to lead the on-going transformational change programme, including the Customer Strategy, and recommends to Council the drawdown from reserves of £180,000 to fund the post.