Council Customer Satisfaction Surveys

On 20th November, a Forum Member sent the following email to Cllr Borthwick:-

Cllr Whittaker (also supported by Cllr Roger West) referred the matter to the Partnerships and Improvement Department, Bournemouth Borough Council, who responded as follows:-

Cllr Whittaker points out that information could be collected through the usual channels, e.g. Councillors, BH Life and Area Forums. The Council’s Consultation and Engagement Manager also confirmed:-

Briefing note re customer satisfaction surveys:

Why do we monitor customer satisfaction with services?

The Council’s customer satisfaction monitoring programme (Measuring Up) gives service managers and Members measurable and comparable performance management data based on customers’ satisfaction levels with some of our key services.

The research measures customer satisfaction through a series of ongoing monthly telephone surveys with residents. Managers set specific quarterly performance targets for their services and use the survey results to benchmark and monitor performance against these over time.

How are the results reported?

Results are published quarterly and exception reports are provided to the Cabinet and the relevant Overview and Scrutiny Panels. The full results are also published on the Bournemouth 2026 Consultation Tracker and promoted on the Council’s main website and the Council Information Bulletin (CIB).

What are the outcomes?

Customer satisfaction monitoring gives

• Service users direct input into shaping services, in a sound and on-going way.
• Members information on service satisfaction levels and the opportunity to input into the setting of improvement targets.
• Managers the data they need to determine where resources should be focused and prioritised in terms of service improvement.

In recent years, the Measuring Up programme has contributed to decisions to introduce service improvements such as:

• Extra staff brought in to deal with drop in satisfaction with ‘time to answer call’ at the contact centre.
• The introduction of an evening cleansing shift to help combat falling satisfaction with litter in town centre.
• Area based teams responding on a 12-hour removal target to deal with falling satisfaction with ‘fly tipping’.
• New staff members recruited and trained to deal with low satisfaction with ‘speed at which calls answered’ in benefits.
• A £30,000 chewing gum removal programme to improve satisfaction with the service

Which services commission the surveys and how much does it cost?

The following services participate in the Measuring Up programme on an ongoing monthly basis:

• Benefits (one quarter per annum only)
• Cleansing and waste customer contact centre
• Highways maintenance
• Housing landlord
• Recycling collection
• Refuse collection
• Street cleansing
• Council communications

The telephone agency’s fee for conducting these ongoing regular surveys is currently approximately £25,000 per year.

Other services also benefit from the Measuring Up surveys by having the opportunity to add extra questions at a more cost effective rate as and when the need arises.

Why use telephone interviews to gather feedback from local people?

Telephone surveys have a very high response rate of approx 80%. This is primarily because the respondent is not required to be pro-active in any way ie does not have to make the effort to go out to a meeting, seek out information, remember to post something etc. A high response rate is a key way of eliminating bias in survey results and thus making the findings more reliable and representative of the wider population.

Other methods of capturing customers’ opinions are less representative of the population e.g. postal surveys only get between 20% and 40% response rates (even with reminders) and tend to get too few responses from younger working residents. The telephone survey methodology not only gets a much higher response rate but also enables the interviewer to work to a quota e.g. for each age group etc to ensure that there is an even spread of people involved.

By using telephone surveys to monitor performance, service managers can be sure that the feedback they are basing their decisions on is reliable and representative of the wider population. Service changes introduced on the basis of ad-hoc customer complaints and feedback alone could in some instances lead us to make a wrong decision or use resources unnecessarily if we do not know how many other customers are of the same view. It could be for example that only a very small number of people feel that way or attach as much importance to the issue.

In the early days of Measuring Up we did try out postal surveys as an option but the number of responses was too low to be of any value to managers.

There is obviously a cost attached to employing a telephone agency to conduct the interviews. The Council minimises the cost by using agency staff only for making the phone calls – all other elements of the survey eg questionnaire design, analysis and reporting are done by the Council’s own Consultation and Engagement team. This saves the Council up to two thirds of the usual commercial rates for telephone surveys.

Why not use Council staff to conduct telephone interviews?

Some people have suggested that money could be saved by using Council contact centre staff to conduct telephone interviews during quieter periods. Whilst this may at first seem like a good idea, the benefits to using a telephone agency over our own staff are:

• To be comparable over time, interviews need to be conducted at the same time for each phase of the survey. If not, seasonal and other influences may distort the trends that emerge from the data.
• The industry standard is that at least 75% of your interviews should be conducted in the evenings to ensure that your sample is not overweighted by unemployed, retired people and home makers.
• Agencies use a specialised CATI system which minimises potential data inputting errors as interviewers input data directly into a tailored programme. Staff would have to use pen and paper and then input the data afterwards into Excel which is time consuming and much more prone to error. Staff would need training in how to ‘code’ answers for data entry.
• Experienced interviewers know how to field questions which come up all the time. For example: Ethnic monitoring - Why we can’t do this by post etc.
• Agency staff’s experience makes them better at getting ‘take-up’ and thus a better response rate. This makes the overall results more representative.
• Respondents don’t always respond in the way we’d like them to ie answer the question we’ve asked. Trained interviewers will persist with the question until it is answered using the scale required. Untrained interviewers tend to interpret the answer (especially as they are not being quality controlled ie. overheard or observed by other professional interviewers) which makes the results unreliable.
• There is clearly an issue around interviewer bias (albeit unintentional) if staff involved in the service are administering the survey. Even staff not directly involved in the service are more likely to be loyal to the Council as a whole.
• Telephone agencies are able to co-ordinate and overview calls via their CATI system so that no one individual is called more than once in a six month time period (this is across all surveys and services).

Why can’t we just rely on other types of customer feedback such as contact with Councillors, Area Forums or BH Life?

We welcome feedback from these sources. They can provide us with useful ideas and alert us to areas of potential concern for further investigation. However none of these are an effective means of monitoring service performance in their own right because:

• You can’t ‘quantify’ this kind of feedback so managers can not use it to track and compare performance over time.
• It’s much more likely to be people who are dissatisfied who will make the effort to write in, attend a forum or contact their Councillor. Satisfied people have less motivation to so. This doesn’t give us any indication of how many of the wider population are satisfied or dissatisfied.
• Only a very small proportion of people will ever go to a forum, contact their Councillor or respond to an article in BH Life. We can not be sure how representative the feedback is and whether all groups of residents feel the same unless we do a wider random survey involving greater numbers of people.

Our Forum Chairman, Les Deller, adds:-

On 4th December, the councils Media and Communications Officer sent the following statement to The Echo:-

And finally, from Councillor Ron Whittaker:-