Spotlight on Building Standards - latest customer service results
By Louise Shearer (23 May 2023)
Aaron Kerr is Team Leader – Building Standards. I last caught up with him during the pandemic when they had achieved their highest customer service score and, with my Customer First hat on, I had been keen to find out more.
At that time (July 2021) the overall score was 8.2, but the latest results see an increased improvement to 8.9 for the last quarter.
Aaron – this is really good news that your satisfaction score continues to rise.
Yes, the Scottish Government’s Building Standards Division introduced a new platform in April 2022 that can collect and report on real time customer feedback in a continuous way throughout the year, rather than the annual survey we used to do.
The latest score of 8.9 is for Q4 (January to March this year). It’s probably important to keep in mind that this figure is for a quarter and not a whole year, which the last result was, therefore the number of responses this is based on is less. However, we’ll be monitoring it right across the year. 8.9 is also above the national target of 7.5 and the Scotland average of 8 for the same quarter.
We’re very keen for our customers (and that is architects, designers and applicants who are members of the public) to record their feedback every time they come into contact with us. A link to the survey is embedded in all our email correspondence and we’re also thinking about other ways we can get the message out that feedback is important.
Customer service is really important in our team and we have our own charter, which is very much aligned to the organisational-wide one. Listening and learning is essential and we do want to learn from what people tell us.
When we last spoke, I remember you telling me that you’re measured against seven key performance outcomes or KPOs, and that two of these come under ‘quality customer experience’.
Yes – KP03 measures us against our commitment to the building standards customer charter I mentioned above and KP04 is about how we understand and respond to the customer experience. That’s where this survey comes in.
You mention above the importance of learning – can you expand on that?
As a team, we’re always keen to learn from our customers' experiences and think about what we can continue to improve on. If someone hasn’t had such a good experience, we also need to know that. Now that we have this new system in place, we can react to issues more quickly without having to wait for the annual return like we used to have to do. It makes us much more agile.
The new system also enables us to interrogate the data better and act on what people are telling us in a more meaningful and timely way.
Any thoughts on the reasons why your score continues to rise?
I think like I said last time, it’s credit to my team who continue to demonstrate a high level of service delivery – I remain very proud of them. When I last spoke to you two years ago, one of the areas I identified for improvement was “to keep doing the good job we’re doing and maintain our positive results” and the results from this latest quarter demonstrate exactly that.