Customer Service Excellence Award

The IT Customer Service Desk have achieved the Customer Service Excellence award. This award is a difficult accreditation to obtain and signifies that we offer efficient, effective, excellent, equitable and empowering customer service – with the customer always and everywhere at the heart of service provision.

Our assessor spent the day in March 2024 conducting interviews with the team, our partners and our customers. In order to achieve this award we were assessed over 5 areas where we needed to achieve compliance:

1. Customer Insight
2. The Culture of the Organisation
3. Information and Access
4. Delivery
5. Timeliness and Quality of Service

There were 5 areas where we achieved compliance plus and our assessor was particularly impressed with the “corporate commitment to putting the customer at the heart of service delivery, which is communicated through strategic and operational plans ” and how we embed these standards across the Service Desk team. The ‘Staff (including new recruits) explained that they feel trusted and empowered to make decisions and identifysolutions to resolve customer’s challenges and issues and to meet their expectations. The customers interviewed used the words always polite and friendly, professional, knowledgeable, and helpful‘. Overall the culture of the organisation was the strongest area for us demonstrating the value of our Service Desk team being at the heart of this award. The 5 compliance plus areas are:

• 2.1.1 – There is corporate commitment to putting the customer at the heart of service delivery andleaders in our organisation actively support this and advocate for customers.
• 2.1.6 – We empower and encourage all employees to actively promote and participate in thecustomer focused culture of our organisation.
• 2.2.1 – We can demonstrate our commitment to developing and delivering customer focusedservices through our recruitment, training and development policies for staff.
• 2.2.2 – Our staff are polite and friendly to customers and have an understanding of customer needs.
• 2.2.4 – We can demonstrate how customer facing staff insights, and experiences are incorporatedinto internal processes, policy development and service planning.

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