As part of it's ongoing focus on customer service Argyll and Bute Council has a Customer Service Charter.The Charter tells customers the standards of response they can expect from council employees depending on how they contact us. Its pledges were designed following consultation with the Citizens’ Panel.

It is important to us that our customers know the standards of customer service they should expect to receive and this Charter seeks to tell them that. Often such Charters are seen as just empty words, so to avoid this, the council measures its performance against these standards and reports back how we are doing. We do this by having an independent company complete an annual mystery shopping exercise that includes testing all of the contact channels used by customers. The third such exercise has just been completed and a report on the outcome, together with recommendations for improvement has been approved by the council's management team. 

The independent mystery shopping exercise also provides us with information on how we are performing against our charter pledges, by benchmarking against other councils. The outcomes from the exercise allow us to score how well we are doing against each of our customer charter pledges and we have now done this for the past three years.

All our employees are made aware of the Customer Service Charter and the Council’s Senior Management team has established an internal Customer Service Board to monitor customer service performance and to manage customer service improvement activities.

The council has also begun a programme of internal mystery shopping exercise using volunteers from the Citizen’s Panel. Each of these will focus on one specific communication channel. To date we have examined how well we handle emails and letters. 

The Customer Charter is widely publicised to customers, not only by this webpage but with posters in every council office and a pocket guide that customers can keep.

For more information or copies of the pocket guide please contact

Bob Miller
Customer Management Project Manager
Robert.Miller@argyll-bute.gov.uk
01546 604026