Our customer commitment

Welcome

We want to deliver the best possible customer service to you and to improve your quality of life locally at an affordable cost. We will deliver your services efficiently but should you need to contact us, we will provide a variety of cost effective channels.

Our commitment sets out the standards of service you can expect from us, whichever service you use, we promise that:

• You are treated as a valued customer
• We are professional and know what we are talking about
• We are open honest and transparent
• We listen to you and act on what you tell us
• We spend your council tax wisely and provide value for money

If you would like to find out how we will be monitoring our promises, please click on the links above.

We would also encourage you to give us your comments and ideas so that we can continue to improve your experience. You can do this by going to our customer engagement platform.

How you can help us:

So that we can deliver our promises to you, we need you to;

• Treat our staff courteously and with respect so that they can deliver the best service possible to you.
• Where possible use the most effective and efficient means to communicate with us.
• Inform us of any changes in your personal circumstances which may affect services we provide to you.
• Please be patient with us and avoid making unnecessary repeat contact with us whilst you are waiting for your response.
• Keep appointments, or try to give us at least 24 hours’ notice if you need to cancel.

We would also really like you to:

• Tell us when you are pleased with our service and when any of these standards are not met.
• Offer ideas and suggestions for improvements and work in partnership with us and engage in community activity, where possible.

Useful links

• Get Involved

Treating you as a valued customer

When you use our website:

• We will make life easy for you by giving you 24/7 access to information via our website, ensuring that we provide you with access to enable you to report, pay, book or enquire about our many services online.
• Wherever possible we will enable you to resolve your enquiry fully online in a secure, user friendly environment - allowing you to interact with us at a time convenient for you, always making sure that we have gained your permission first.
• By doing this, we will generally be able to resolve your enquiry faster and more effectively where you use our on-line services.

When you phone us:

• We will always take ownership of your query, advise you of the best channel and quickest outcome specific to your query. This means that we will offer you a MyAccount facility, anticipating your service needs.
• When you phone our contact centre, we will maintain a minimum customer satisfaction level of 95%.

When you write to us or email us: 

• On average we will provide a response within 2 working days to emails sent to contact@croydon.gov.uk and a written response to all standard enquiries and requests within 10 working days.
• Our letters and emails will be written in plain, clear language so that it is easy for you to understand and will be clear of our proposed actions and expected timescales.
• We will offer you the ease of receiving all correspondence online so that you can interact with us quicker.

When you meet with us:

• We will provide clear and easy access at all our customer service areas, ensuring that we greet you within 1 minute of arrival and provide you with an appropriate way to interact with us to resolve your enquiry.
• When meeting you elsewhere we will arrive promptly and will show you council identification. If we have to postpone a pre-arranged meeting, for good reason, we will give you at least 24 hours’ notice with an explanation of why.

When you make a complaint:

• We will contact you promptly if you have raised any concerns about our service and you can expect a written response within 20 working days from receipt of your complaint.
• We will apologise and do our best to put things right as quickly as possible whilst handling all complaints professionally and politely. It is also important that we tell you of the next steps should we be unable to resolve your query.

Our commitment

We promise that:

We are professional and know what we are talking about:

• We will continually develop our staff and improve our systems and processes so that we can deliver excellent customer service to you.
• We will resolve all queries within our agreed service levels to get it right first time for you and if we don’t know the answer we will find someone who does, for you.

We are open, honest and transparent:

• We will tell you who is dealing with your enquiry, how long we expect to take and let you know of any issues along the way. We will be honest and open when we cannot provide you the service you want and give you the reasons why.
• We will tell you how we are improving the services for you. This means that we will be present at resident groups and panels, ensuring we are held to account for service delivery.

We listen to you and act on what you tell us:

• We will make sure there are a variety of opportunities for you to engage with us and tell us what you think of our services and how we can improve. This includes offering you a variety of platforms in which to communicate with us.
• We will make sure that where we have consulted with you and that the final outcomes are available for you to see, where we can’t meet your requirements, we will tell you why.

We spend your council tax wisely and provide value for money:

• We will find out what your priorities are for spending the council’s budget and will continue to look for new ways of working, reducing overheads and costs of systems where possible.
• We will work in partnership with you to deliver council services and ensure that we publish how we spend your money on the council’s website. We will also analyse complaints data and take action when we have got it wrong.

How are we performing?

It is important that we tell you how are performing against our promises, therefore we will:

• Tell you how many of our customers have registered for a customer account which enables you to report, pay, book or enquire about our services online (Jan 2016)
• Publish our contact centre customer satisfaction rates, ensuring that we meet and maintain a level of 95% (March 2016)
• Provide information on how many times our online services can be accessed by you – ensuring that we provide you with 24/7 access to information (March 2016)
• Engage with you to test our messages including language for key letters, providing you with “you said, we did” feedback (March 2016)
• Our engagement results will be available for you to view through our engagement system.