Nelson City Council wants to make it easier for you to access its services, but that also means they might not be able to help you solve 14 Across.
The council is currently undergoing an organisational “transformation”, and the most obvious changes to residents will likely be the council’s approach to customer service.
During Thursday’s meeting of the council’s Customer Experience Oversight Committee, Mayor Nick Smith acknowledged that the organisation was a “monopoly”.
“People don't have a choice about having to come to us… To provide a service that treats them as a customer is crucial.”
But customers’ experiences with the council were varied and could be broken into three key areas: self-service, queries, and service requests.
Customer self-service involved individuals successfully finding information or accessing council services by themselves.
Queries involved people asking questions of the council via email, phone, or coming to the front desk.
While service requests involved people asking for the provision of specific services, such as clearing drains or weeding reserves.
On average, there were about 1000 instances of self-service each month.
That was well below the monthly averages of 5500 queries and 3000 service requests.
The council’s new head of customer experience, Matt Lorraine, said that the community demand was high and that was putting strain on the customer service team.
“I have been amazed, impressed, astounded, by the breadth of queries that are coming into the customer service centre.”
Council’s customer service staff had a “real desire” to help residents, he said, but that had resulted in some “scope creep”.
“There have been a couple of examples where the customer probably should have called 111, the emergency services, but instead called the council.”
Bridget Jolly, council’s new executive director for people and customer experience, added that the customer service staff also received calls on the opposite end of the importance spectrum.
“The team literally has people ring up to ask them to help with crosswords… we need at some stage to be able to say, ‘That’s not actually our role’.”
A range of measures were being implemented to take some of the pressure off the customer service team.
They include being clearer when an issue was not a council responsibility, upskilling customer service staff knowledge, digitising more forms, being more proactive in providing updates to customers, and ensuring greater oversight of requests to guarantee they were completed.
But even as the council attempts to increase the number of people who can serve themselves and reduce customer service interactions, it was also investigating options to ensure services and support were physically closer to residents.
“We are aiming to make it easier for customers to get things done with the council,” Matt said.
