Agenda item

For committee to note the performance reported against contract measures, and to direct interventions or further investigations regarding performance, as considered necessary.

Matt Goodwin updated the committee on performance, with material updates from over the last two months. Capita’s Regional Partnership Director was present to assist.

Main points:

• Land charges performing on target. Workloads remain high.
• Customer service has had a more difficult few months, due to waste collection issues. Some improvement had been seen since. Havant had secured new drivers for waste collection, and better communications were in place.
• PI4 for revenues and benefits had a few failures to meet targets, mainly due to the opening of courts and pursuing of council tax debt. The Call centre had received extra calls, and the calls had been longer, in order to support customers through the process.
• IT failed a PI on service desk – a recording error that caused the failure had now been corrected.
• Revenues and benefits – no PIs to report at the present time,
• DWP process / universal credit backlog creates an onward backlog for Capita, but Capita were working hard to resolve this. Robust plans in place should mean that PIs would be achieved by year end.

Committee asked questions to Matt Goodwin.

Committee members raised concerns, as they had previously, on how feedback was captured from the 20% of calls which were not being answered quickly? Matt Goodwin noted that detailed information was available in this space. Chair suggested a high-level summary of such data and was in agreement with Cllr Wyke on this issue. Councillors were encouraged to report complaints, to be investigated by Capita. Capita do investigate what went wrong and aim to learn from this.

Action: Matt Goodwin to follow up with Capita on what happens to the 20%.

Discussion on Customer Services PI004: It was explained that Council Tax recovery and court actions had negatively affected this target. Call volumes had increased, in regard to letters and summons issued, and handling times were longer as agents worked to support customers on making arrangements. On the positive side, collection rates were on the increase.

Action: Matt Goodwin can circulate evidence of council tax improvement via email.

On the topic of dropped calls (revs and bens), it was asked why a high customer satisfaction rate was reported if there were dropped calls? Why aren’t these customers asked for feedback? It was responded that the customer survey was a random selection of people who did speak to an agent. Even if some calls aren’t picked up straight away, they may still be satisfied with the resulting service. This was part of the ongoing issue about how to monitor those callers who were unable to get a resolution within the “closed loop” system.

Committee was informed that there was intention to develop an end-to-end survey to capture those customer’s experiences. This may assist in obtaining the whole picture of customer service. This would likely be in the new calendar year. Matt Goodwin would feedback on this, and work was being carried out on this by Gareth Stemp at Capita.

Committee were advised that the mystery shopper suggestion would be discussed in the following agenda item.

Resolved: The committee considered the report and provided comments as outlined above.