Managing a Quality Service Examples, Scored

As an Executive Officer in a council tax support team, I was responsible for answering complaints. I noticed that 30% of complaints came from people who had been sent a bill they could not read because English was not their first language or they had a visual impairment.

I analysed six months of complaints to find the most common issues and shared the findings with my manager, recommending that we offer bills in other formats. With her agreement, I worked with our print supplier to produce large-print and easy-read versions and arranged for a telephone interpreting service to be listed on every bill. I checked the costs against our budget and found that the change would add less than 2% to printing costs.

I then wrote clear guidance for the team on how to record a customer's preferred format, and I tested the new process with five customers who had complained, keeping them updated at each stage.

I also set up a monthly check of complaints so we could spot new problems early.

In the following six months, complaints about unreadable bills fell by 65%, and the average time to resolve a complaint dropped from 15 to 8 working days. Two of the customers I contacted wrote to thank the team. The council has since added format preferences to its online account system. I learned to look at patterns in complaints rather than treating each one alone.

As an Administrative Officer on a helpline, I took a call from an elderly customer who was confused about a letter telling her that her benefit would change.

I listened carefully to understand what she was worried about and asked questions to check I had the right details. I explained the change in simple words and checked she understood by asking her to tell me what would happen next. She told me she found it hard to read our letters, so I recorded this on her file and arranged for future letters to be sent in large print.

I also noticed that the letter had the wrong date for the change, so I reported the error to my supervisor straight away, and she passed it to the team that produced the letters.

The customer thanked me and said she felt much calmer. The letter was corrected for other customers the following week. I learned that small details, like checking a letter carefully, can prevent problems for many people.

In my HEO role I manage the customer correspondence team, and we are responsible for replying to letters and emails from the public within 20 working days.

Last year we were not meeting this target because of a large increase in correspondence. We looked at our processes and identified some areas where we could improve. We introduced new templates for the most common types of letters and we also changed the way we allocated work, so that more experienced staff dealt with complex cases.

We kept our stakeholders updated about our performance through monthly reports, and we made sure that the quality of our replies remained high by checking a sample of letters each week. I also made sure that we considered the needs of different customers.

Our performance improved and the team received positive feedback. Managing a quality service is something I am passionate about, and I always make sure that customers receive a professional and efficient service.