Spotlight on services

By Louise Shearer

As project manager for the Council’s Customer First project last year, which led to the first Customer Charter and Strategy, I was very interested to hear that our Roads Service conduct their own customer satisfaction survey. I met with Roads Network Team Leader, Neil Hutcheson, to find out more about the questionnaire and, most importantly, how they use the results to inform service delivery.

Neil, can you tell me why you send out a satisfaction survey and to who?

Our customer satisfaction survey is very important in that it helps us gauge how we’re performing against the expectations of local road users. It’s based on the APSE (Association for Public Sector Excellence) template and is sent to one thousand randomly selected households throughout Shetland. Topics range from staff friendliness to the promptness of repairs. The latest survey was sent out in July 2018 and we received 203 responses – a return rate of just over 20%.

APSE – can you explain a bit more about who this is?

APSE is a benchmarking organisation, which compares our performance against other local authorities across the UK.

So this is not just Scottish local authorities that are being compared?

No, APSE will group similar councils into families and the benefit of that is that similar local authorities are fairly compared. We’re benchmarked against Aberdeenshire, Angus, South Ayrshire, Wrexham, Orkney, Durham County and Ceredigion County Councils.

What do you focus on in the survey?

There are two aspects we specifically focus on. We ask people to rank a list in order of importance for their area and also Shetland wide, and this list includes things like traffic levels and congestion, condition of main roads and single track carriageways, street lighting and safety on roads. We then ask people to tell us how well we perform in a number of different areas including friendliness of staff, ease of obtaining information, road maintenance, cutting grass verges and giving sufficient warning of major road works.

Highlights from the latest survey:

Most important in local area:

1) Safety on roads
2) Condition of main road carriageways

Least important in local area:

1) Street lighting
2) Cycle routes and facilities

What most needs improvement in your local area:

1) Condition of single-track road carriageways
2) Safety on roads

Most important Shetland wide:

1) Condition of main road carriageways
2) Condition of single-track road carriageways

Least important Shetland wide:

1) Street lighting
2) Cycle routes and facilities

What needs most improvement Shetland wide:

1) Condition of single-track road carriageways
2) Safety on roads

Have you made any changes as a result of this feedback?

Yes – we’ve looked through all the individual comments as well as the overall results. We’ve already decided to do more maintenance on single track side roads using resurfacing and surface dressing.

A road condition survey is completed every year by the Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland so we’re already aware where the areas are we need to target.

The customer survey supports these findings by highlighting that the Shetland public would like us to prioritise single track roads, so with that evidence we’ll put more of our budget towards surface dressing and resurfacing of these roads this year.

Can you adapt the template to fit local needs?

Yes and this time we decided to include several questions on our existing winter service, including some questions on gritting. We thought it was a really good opportunity to find out a bit more about any specific concerns, particularly as this is a random survey and it’s also weighted so that each community council is represented.

What did the results tell you on your winter service?

61% of respondents rated our gritting/snow clearing of rural main roads as excellent or good. 70% of respondents said the same for main roads in Lerwick, while 35% felt that rural minor and side roads could be rated this way.

There were three particular areas we reviewed where people had concerns around our winter service arrangements and those were added into the template survey. These were: the level of gritting/ploughing provided in the evenings after 5.00pm; at the weekends; and on public holidays (Christmas, New Year’s Days).

The results indicated that a fairly significant proportion of people had some concerns about the existing arrangements and so we realised that we needed to do something to try to address some of these.

I understand that the results helped inform this past winter’s service arrangements?

Yes – we made three changes (which you can read about in full on the Council’s COINS system at www.shetland.gov.uk/coins/agenda.asp?meetingid=5849 Item 2).

Considering “the level of gritting/ploughing provided after 5pm” 11% of those that responded were very dissatisfied with this arrangement and 22% fairly dissatisfied. This compares with 13% who were very satisfied, 35% who were fairly satisfied and 19% who were neither satisfied or dissatisfied.

The results for “the level of gritting provided at the weekend” were very similar with again 11% very dissatisfied, 23% fairly dissatisfied, 22% who were neither, 33% fairly satisfied and 11% very satisfied.

There was less dissatisfaction with “the level of gritting provided at Christmas and New Year” with again 11% very dissatisfied, 17% fairly dissatisfied, 29% neither, 31% fairly satisfied and 12% very satisfied.

Concern: the level of gritting/ploughing provided after 5pm – the solution was to formalise arrangements for responding to “blue light” emergencies, other Police “call-outs” and adverse conditions resulting from incorrect weather forecasting, so a gritter crew was on stand-by in each area during the winter season (mid-October to end of March, 23 weeks). This would ensure a quicker response and enable more roads to be treated if considered necessary.

Concern: the level of gritting/ploughing provided at the weekends and public holidays – The concern here was that more people are now using the road network on a Saturday and Sunday to travel to work, deliver goods or for recreational or social purposes. These activities were all affected by the later start and the policy not to treat priority 3 roads at weekends even when conditions are severe. Our solution was to match the weekend and weekday regimes, which would avoid any confusion regarding gritting times.

Concern: the level of gritting/ploughing provided on Christmas, New Year’s Days – The same concern was expressed that more people are now using the road network on these two public holidays than was the case previously. While there is undoubtedly less business or work related travel on these days, people employed in the service sector and providing essential services still use the roads on these days. The solution was to formalise the provision of a gritter crew on standby in each area should it be deemed necessary.

You say that the survey was recommended by the new code of practice for road maintenance and management as being essential when setting levels of service – can you tell me more about that?

A new UK-wide Code of Practice “Well-managed Highway Infrastructure” was published in October 2016, which we needed to adopt by October last year (2018). There was a standard list of 36 recommendations to be addressed and we found we’d already addressed most of these. The one exception was to complete a customer satisfaction survey and so we repeated ours at this time.

It’s very important to understand what our service users’ priorities are, which in turn informs our service delivery. We’ll continue to repeat these regularly so that we can compare results and keep a check on how we’re improving.