Wednesday 30 April 2014

Customer Service Excellence

A long time ago, about 5 years to be exact, we had a world cafe event and came up with the vision for our department:

“We will be an innovative and influential department, respected by the University and recognised as a leader in the sector, delivering excellent customer-focused services”

For the last few months we've been reviewing whether we achieve some of those aspirations, and concentrating particularly on delivering excellent customer service. We've been carrying our several pieces of work, including facilitated focus groups with a cross section of all staff, and it all came together today in our first Customer Service Conference. Split into two half day sessions it was very well attended, and we'll be looking at the outputs over the next few days with interest. In order to start everyone off thinking, myself and the Assistant Directors gave our view of excellent customer service in the form of an animated video produced by our video intern, Sam.



After some feedback from the focus groups and work on our tables looking at what we could do to deliver excellent customer service, we had a talk from Andy Hanselman. Excellent as always with some great insights into what makes good, and bad, customer experiences. He did a talk at TEDX in Sheffield a few years ago, which you can watch here.



Unfortunately I had to leave to catch a train before the end, so I missed the final discussion on what things we can do in CiCS, and what individuals can do to make our customer service excellent, but if look forward to seeing all of the suggestions.

I'm in Oxford at the moment as I've found myself back on the Executive Committee as I'm now Chair of the conference organising committee. It's our planning meeting for the following year. And, we are thinking of getting up at 5am for Oxford's Mayday celebrations. I have a choice of the choristers on the tower of Magdalen College, Morris Dancers, or John Otway. No contest!

Edit:  Actually there was a contest - I stayed in bed....



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