This toolkit contains material to assist agencies deliver improvements in service culture and customer services. The Waterloo Human Services Collaborative Group has adopted the NSW Customer Commitments as the customer service framework for its activities in Waterloo to help achieve its outcome of improved service culture and provision of customer services
All agencies, Government and NGO are expected to have or develop appropriate customer service standards based on the NSW Customer Commitments. All agencies are encouraged to display their customer service commitments at points of service and to encourage feedback from service users on their customer service, to be accountable to their commitments and to be involved in continuous improvement.
Some of the materials in this tool kit have been adapted from or refer to those developed in Western Sydney and the Blue Mountains by DCJ and NGOs for that area. These can be found at www.linker.org.au
Below are links to the Customer Service Toolkit contents on this page:
Rationale for a common customer service approach
- A Rationale for a common Government and NGO statement.
- The Rationale for Government Agencies Customer Commitments
- Waterloo Collaborative Rationale for adopting the NSW Customer Commitments
Tools – A Guide for Great Customer Service
- Why is this important?
- Organisations that deliver great customer service consistently do the following:
- How do organisations create a culture of great customer service?
- What can organisations do to promote a customer service culture across the Collaborative?
- Tips Managers can give staff.
- What Customer Service Culture Sounds like over the phone.
- Customer Service Organisational Self-Assessment Form
Tools – Customer Service and Enquiry / Complaint Response
Tools – Always Welcome Approach (Our Services are consistently welcoming)
Tools – Use Customer Journey Maps to improve customer experience
You can also download the content of the Tool Kit as a PDF at the link below:
The NSW Customer Commitments
In summary the NSW Customer Commitments are:
Easy to access
- Make it easy to access what I need.
- Make it simple for me to understand.
Act with empathy
- Show you understand my situation.
- Treat me fairly and with respect.
- Provide service in my time of need.
Respect my time
- Tell me what I need to know beforehand.
- Minimise the need for me to repeat myself.
- Make what I need to do straightforward.
Explain what to expect
- Be clear about what steps are involved.
- Contact me when I need to know something.
- Let me know what the outcomes could be.
Resolve the situation
- Be accountable for your actions.
- Be clear in decision-making Reach an outcome.
- Reach an outcome
Engage the community
- Listen to the community to understand our needs.
- Ask us how we want services delivered.
More information on the NSW Customer Commitments can be found at https://www.nsw.gov.au/nsw-government/state-of-customer/commitments with implementation resources at the NSW Governments Customer Experience Unit’s CX Hub.
Individual NSW Government Departments have Customer Service Statements that are to align with the NSW Customer Commitments and are to be reflected in an organisation’s KPIs, satisfaction measurement and continual customer improvement strategies.
Some key NSW Government Department customer service statements relevant to Waterloo are:
- Homes NSW / DCJ Housing’s Housing Practice Standards
- NSW Health Your healthcare rights and responsibilities
- Police Customer Service Program
- Education Customer Service Statement
Rationale for a common customer service approach
This document contains the following Rationales for a common Customer Service approach across Collaborative agencies:
A Rationale for a common Government and NGO statement.
The Rationale for Government Agencies Customer Commitments
Waterloo Collaborative Rationale for adopting the NSW Customer Commitments
Tools – A Guide for Great Customer Service
Why is this important?
It is important that people’s service experience is consistently positive. We know that clients who receive a positive experience when accessing a service are significantly more likely to remain engaged in support and recommend that service to a friend or family member.
A network with a strong culture of great customer service helps clients feel their time spent with services is rewarding and worthwhile. Critically, it ensures clients remain engaged until the desired outcomes have been achieved.
What is this?
Customer Service refers to the extent to which the services offered by an organisation meets or surpasses the expectations of their clients. Organisations that make customer service a high priority are statistically proven to engage and retain clients much better than those who neglect it.
What it is not?
It is not an expectation that workers must do anything and everything a client asks or expects. It’s not being artificially happy or insincere.
Organisations that deliver great customer service consistently do the following:
- All staff are on board with being respectful and responsive to whoever walks in the door.
- Expectations of staff are made clear in recruitment practices and job descriptions.
- Strategic planning at a Board/management level reflects a commitment to strong customer service.
- Polices are in place that reflect organisational expectations.
- The value of good customer service is upheld and modelled by managers/leaders.
- Staff make people feel welcome and comfortable with a non-judgmental approach.
- Staff dress casually so as not to be intimidating.
- The organization strives to create a safe and welcoming work environment to promote a sense of comfort.
- Managers promote good practice by reviewing and discussing staff customer service practices in supervision and monthly staff meetings.
- Organisations invest in detailed induction of new staff and volunteers.
- Reception workers benefit from close debriefing and supervision.
- Workers are well trained and have the information and resources they need to assist people.
- Organisations undertake self-evaluation and have a healthy complaint culture.
- Actively look for quality – understand what works and what does not, repeat what works.
- Self-care … hard for staff to be friendly if they are burnt out.
- Understand and focus on what can we do for people at the essential point of contact.
How do organisations create a culture of great customer service?
- Culture is role-modelled from manager level down.
- Encourage genuine empathy and compassion is valued.
- Privacy and professionalism are taken seriously.
- Act quickly on complaints and feedback.
- Good systems and procedures ensure communication is clear.
- Staff understand and can communicate reasonable limitations to manage expectations.
- Staff are well trained and supported in their roles.
- ‘How well’ service is delivered is high on strategic plan and team meetings.
- Welcome opportunities for client feedback via surveys, discussion groups, questionnaires.
What can organisations do to promote a customer service culture across the Collaborative?
- Build trust through regular meetings and communication.
- Encourage and support relevant training opportunities, sharing of knowledge and examples of good practice.
- Mentoring for managers and staff across the network.
- Have agreed consequences for organisations who give clients bad experiences.
- Shared approach to let clients know that they will receive a consistent quality service from Collaborative partners.
- Invite client feedback between organisations.
Tips Managers can give staff.
- Let them see you smile.
- Be positive… let them see your smile. A positive experience and a worker that makes a positive impression will go a long way.
- Let your unhappy clients guide you.
- Listen to those that are dissatisfied and act on their advice when it rings true. Find out as much detail as possible. How can you improve overall, not just the end problem?
- Put the client at the heart of your decisions.
- Put the client at the heart of your decisions and take a balanced approach.
- Be focused on problem solving, not on the process.
- Set the right expectations.
- Be precise and clear in your communication, so you control the expectations you create. Keep your promises.
- Be prepared to have multiple interaction approaches.
- As a client, I expect your staff to adapt his or her style to meet mine, so that we have a good rapport, and your service feels like a ‘fit’ for me. It is important that the client feels as if they are your number-one client, regardless of the number of clients you serve.
- Tone is very important.
- Always use positive words with a genuine interest in the client’s needs.
- Personalise Customer experience.
- Customers want to be treated as individuals, not as statistics.
- No matter whether I tweeted you, called you, sent an email, put a post on your Facebook page, or a combination of all of those, you know who I am, what I need and where it’s up to.
- Share client feedback to the wider network
- If people are constantly hearing the same client’s complaints, get your staff to relay these complaints back to people who can act on the issues, to make sure future clients don’t face the same problems.
- Respond to phone messages quickly.
- With social media, this is the age of the instant answer. A one-day turnaround for an email or phone call is too slow!
- Try to send a reply quickly, even if it is just to confirm you have received their message and to set expectations for when they can get a proper reply.
- Be honest.
- Be honest. Clients appreciate it! Listen to your clients and educate them for better understanding. You can engage them more if you let them see the bigger picture and the background of some of your decisions.
What Customer Service Culture Sounds like over the phone.
Exhibiting good customer service over the phone involves many of the same techniques as when face to face with a client:
- Sit up straight and smile – body language impacts tone and pitch.
- Mimic the client’s tone and match their pitch and pace.
- Repeat and acknowledge what the client is telling you.
- Assume there is an existing rapport.
- Be mindful and respectful of cultural differences, including language proficiencies (and use interpreters when needed).
Section adapted from Linker Playbook pages 19-22
Customer Service Organisational Self-Assessment Form
This form is designed to assist organisations identify any potential areas for improvement in Customer Service within your organisation (this activity is best done with a small team of people and repeated annually).
Tools – Customer Service and Enquiry / Complaint Response
Why is this important
Service users often complain that services are difficult to access, clients are unsure who to go to and when they make an approach service are not responsive and do not meet expectations. In response the Waterloo Action Plan proposed that “Government and non-government organisation to provide clear timelines and commitments to respond to client or service enquiries”.
This is a customer service issue and NSW Customer Commitments and the customer service guidance in this tool kit apply. You will find many tools and templates online to help improve customer service response times. Response times are considered the most important metric when it comes to delivering great customer service – for example see https://www.keeping.com/content/customer-response-time/.
Tenants and agencies also report complex issues, or ones that involve multiple agencies or issues, then cannot be easily resolved by the initial contact person often disappear into a black hole and no response is received. Agencies need to make a response within their given timeframes even if they don’t yet have a resolution. A response that says “it’s complicated and we’re working on it” or “we can’t resolve this problem” or “we need more time to resolve this” at least lets people know the issue has not been forgotten or ignored.
Agencies report that the same issue is often raised through multiple channels. Having well-functioning formal processes and feedback / capacity building / training for tenants and advocates are also seen as an important to enquiry and response feedback. Resources on effective advocacy should be added to the Toolkit.
Agency Checklist
Dealing with customer service enquiries and complaints are also a systems issues both within agencies and where multiple agencies are involved. Clear internal processes are required for staff to be able to meet service user’s expectations.
Agencies are likely to already have mechanisms in place for dealing with enquiries and complaints. These processes should be continually assessed as part of the organisations customer service approach for continuous improvement and addressing service user feedback.
Below is a check list of mechanisms / approaches agencies should have or should consider:
- Well publicised public contact points for people seeking information, raising issues or make complaints.
- Internal pathway for staff to refer issues raised with them, on the organisations social media channels or at a meeting for follow-up.
- A Linker approach where staff own the issue and respond to the client until it can be referred or escalated to the appropriate person/service.
- Public timeframes for responding to enquiries/issues and complaints and exceed those timeframes as much as possible.
- Internal guidelines/training for staff dealing with customer enquiries and complaints – they are the face of the organisation.
- Internal referral pathways for responses that cannot be handled by the contact point/person.
- Processes for ensuring a response is made within the specified time frame and follow-up if required – even if that is “we are still on the case”.
- A mechanism for follow-up and updating of the external party if the expected response timeframe cannot be met.
- A mechanism for logging enquiries and complaints for follow-up and for analysing patterns and systemic issues
- Responses to customer inquiries and complaints should be part of an organisations customer service KPIs and continuous improvement.
Where multiple agencies are involved in either formal or informal gatherings:
- The person / organisation / group who initially deals with the enquiry / complaint owns it until it can be considered by the relevant agencies. This should apply also where events move quickly or there is not an action plan or follow-up mechanism.
- The multi-agency mechanism should, through Service Level Agreements or Terms of Reference or similar, have an agreed mechanism for dealing with and responding to enquiries / complaints. This should involve a process for follow-up where responses cannot be made quickly.
- The multi-agency mechanism should maintain an action list to keep track of unresolved enquiries / complaints that or required follow-up.
- Refer any systemic issues identified to the Waterloo Collaborative for consideration.
Timeliness in response is important
- If a response can be given more quickly, it is good customer service to do so. People also need to know how to escalate the issue if the timeframe is not met.
- Respond ASAP even if that is an auto-response or an email / post just to confirm you have received the message and to set expectations for when they can get a proper reply.
- If a proper reply is not forthcoming within the provided timeframe, follow up internally and update the external party with progress.
- An active linker approach owns the issue until the person gets what they are looking for or that responsibility is handed over to someone else.
Response Timeframes: Some agencies have public timeframes in which responses should be received:
- LAHC call centre staff have a decision tree for Maintenance which sets priorities and timeframes for different kinds of maintenance.
- DCJ Housing has a response timeframe for different types of enquiries as below:
- Request for a transfer to a different property (e.g., 28 days after the request is submitted).
- Anti-social behaviour complaint (14 days after the complaint is lodged).
- Other tenancy-related matters within 14 days.
How to Respond to Customer Complaints
- Listen to or read the customer’s complaint.
- Take a moment to process the criticism.
- Determine what action you’ll take to address the problem.
- Thank the customer for their feedback.
- Apologize and reiterate your understanding of the issue.
- Clearly outline your plan to remedy the situation.
- Thank the customer again and offer follow-up information.
- Check to see if the customer is happy with the result.
- Incorporate changes from customer feedback.
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/respond-to-customer-complaints
This resource has been prepared by the Service Integration and Systems Coordination Group as part of Action 4.4 in the Waterloo Plan.
Tools – Always Welcome Approach (Our Services are consistently welcoming)
Why is this Important
We all feel good when we’re greeted with a warm, caring hello. It starts the experience on a positive note, making you more receptive to receiving help, more likely to come back, and more likely to recommend that person/service to others. We genuinely have a better experience.
Members of the Waterloo Collaborative are committed to providing people with a welcoming experience every time they access a service. It is critical to not only delivering a great service experience, but ensures people are highly engaged so they won’t fall through the gaps in our system.
When we can do this consistently, clients will feel both safe and encouraged to engage in the next step of support. Importantly, they will be more likely to return and follow up on agreed actions.
What is this?
An ‘always welcome’ investment in staff training and supervision that contributes to a strong ‘Customer Service’ culture – clients feel listened to, not assessed. Workers are supported to adopt a ‘people not paper’ approach, focusing on building understanding and rapport with clients, and acting like a linker to support them if necessary.
What it is not?
Lip service assumption that everyone knows how to be ‘nice’. An ‘always welcome’ approach should feel person-centred, not appointment centred.
Advice for new staff
Below are some suggestions from front line staff about how they would induct or coach a new employee on how to give a great ‘always welcome’ greeting.
This is what they said (feel free to share it with your staff):
- Welcome and introduce yourself to the client.
- Smile, introduce yourself, be non-judgmental, and be open. Non-verbal cues when face to face is a good way to help facilitate building trust.
- Always have someone suitable at the front desk
- When the phone rings, pause and mentally prepare, don’t be thinking about rushing back to what you were doing before it rang.
- When on the phone, be clear about what you’ll be doing for the client and give them a realistic time frame for a call back (e.g., by explaining to them what the process is to give them an idea of why it will take that amount of time)
- Make sure you call the client back.
- Provide your details so they can follow up again if they need to
- Attend training in effective communication.
- Don’t assume anything about the clients or make judgements.
- Be attentive and tolerant about what they’re telling you, be the support they need you to be.
- Know what other services are/who does what in your organisation.
Section adapted from Linker Playbook pages47-48
Always Welcome – Organisation Self-Assessment form
This form is designed to assist organisations identify any potential areas for improvement in its Always Welcome approach (this activity is best done with a small team of people and repeated annually).
Tools – Use Customer Journey Maps to improve customer experience
This section of the Tool Kit was adapted from a Masterclass provided by Customer Service NSW to the Collaborative. Customer Service NSW is a member of the Collaborative. It has undertaken some Customer Journey mapping for the Collaborative which have been used as mapping examples at the end of this section.
What is a Customer Journey Map (CJM)
A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of the experiences of a customer in navigating their way through a service landscape to achieve a goal.
- It creates empathy by being shown from the perspective of a customer.
- It focuses on service or product touchpoints (interactions) and their experiences with these.
- It provides an understanding of links between services or service elements over time and identifies problem areas to be solved.
A Customer Journey Map is (just) one output within the design process.
- It draws on the output of Discovery, using qualitative and quantitative research methods.
- The research methods chosen need to ground the journey map in real customer experiences rather than an abstract notion of how a service works.
- It assists in defining the key problem/s to be solved.
Customer journey maps set a great foundation for you and your teams for building a collective understanding of your customers’ current experience.
Benefits for Customers
- Services that meet the real underlying needs of customers
- An improved customer experience of products or services
- Less stress and frustration when using products or services
- Removal of thought overload when determining how to use services
- Increased popularity and use of services by customers
Benefits for Government and Services
- Provides an external, customer perspective of the problem at hand (outside-in approach).
- Helps paint a picture of the wider context in which the problem lies.
- Helps staff understand and build empathy for customers.
- Identify and eliminate ineffective touchpoints/ processes.
- Break down silos between teams and departments and close those gaps.
- Target specific customer personas/ audiences with solutions relevant to their experience
- Understand and assign ownership of various customer touchpoints to increase employee accountability.
Many ways of mapping
When doing a Customer Journey Map, always look for new ideas so that you can select a format and map elements that best suits the type of journey that you are visualising.
However, there are some basic elements that you would always expect to see in a CJM:
- Who the customer is.
- The journey that they are undertaking.
- The interactions with service touchpoints that occur across different phases of the journey and the links between these, shown as customer actions.
- Their experience at each point in the journey, shown as pain points, gain points and level of effort required.
- Opportunities to create a better customer experience.
While not obligatory, these additional elements can be useful in adding depth and bringing your CJM to life:
- Customer quotes (to show customer thoughts and provide evidence)
- Relevant data snapshots (adding a quantitative element to your CJM)
For More Information
Customer Service NSW use Miro for constructing CJMs you can find more information about tools including for Customer Journey Mapping at the CX Hub.
For more information on customer journey mapping see – https://www.nngroup.com/articles/customer-journey-mapping
Waterloo Customer Journey map examples.
Below you will find three maps produced from mapping undertaken by Customer Services NSW. It is important to understand that the three examples are snapshots of customer journeys at a particular point of time. Since the maps were made there have been changes made to the way services operate to address identified issues. The maps should not be taken to represent services as they exist today. They are included here as historical examples of customer journey maps previously undertaken in Waterloo.
The material on this website was last updated on 24 February 2024 with material from 4 December 2023.
You can also download the content of the Tool Kit as a PDF at the link below:
