Sefton Council’s Customer Centric Services division covers all aspects of Customer Services Citizen Transactions and associated support services. These include the collection of Council Tax, Business Rates and other Revenues. Also included are the assessment of Housing Benefits, Council Tax Reductions and other financial awards. Customer Services, include a telephone Contact Centre and One Stop Shops dealing with customer enquiries and interactions, on behalf of a wide range of Council services, via telephone, email, social media and face-to-face.
The division is committed to providing a high-quality of service and to measure our success in achieving this goal, we are publishing a summary of each team’s performance here. This will be updated on a quarterly basis:
- Work volumes - the team has continued to maintain the excellent work position with workloads. As at 30th September 2025, there were 10,019 documents outstanding, compared to over 13,904 documents at the same point in 2024 and 35,000 documents in 2023, Changes are being processed within two weeks compared to up to 16 weeks at the same time last year.
- My account / paperless billing- the team now has 28,139 residents registered for a My Account. Customers are using the online portal to see how much they need to pay in Council Tax and when payments are due. They are also using My Account to apply for discounts and set up Direct Debits and reporting any changes online with almost 60% of changes automated. Further improvements have recently been made to the portal to improve security and the look and feel for customers managing their Council tax account online.
- Collected over £119.4million in 2025/26.
- Premium Exceptions – 210 exceptions to the long-term empty/unoccupied furnished premium are currently applicable.
- Work volumes - the team continued to maintain the excellent work position with workloads. As at 30th September 2025, there were 431 documents outstanding, compared to over 751 documents at the same point in 2024 and 1,036 documents in 2023, Changes are being processed within 5 days.
- My account / paperless billing- the team now has over 1,100 businesses registered for a My Account. Businesses are using the online portal to see how much they need to pay in Business Rates and when payments are due. They are also using My Account to notify of changes, set up Direct Debits and update personal/contact details online with over 88% of actions being automated.
- Phone calls- Between the 1st July and 30th September 2025, the team received 833 phone calls, 75 less than the same period last year, and successfully answered 95% of these. This will be due to the team being up to date with incoming work and automation with changes reported via My account.
- Analyse Local RV finder – has identified approximately £580k in additional revenue.
- Commenced an exercise to review all 8,000 properties on the Business Rates database to ensure that the information held is accurate and up to date.
- Collected over £68.3million Business Rates for 2025/26 as well as significant sums for previous years arrears.
- Accounts Receivable- 400 Customers now signed up to Direct Debit for Sundry Debt
- Accounts Receivable- £17 million in payments received
- Accounts Payable-there were 20k identified from the duplicate payment system
- Accounts Payable- Supplier Early payment scheme, £25k raised in rebates
- Accounts Payable & Receivable- 1735 phone calls dealt with
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Assessments Performance QTR 2 (July to September 2025/26) |
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|
Tasks |
Total Assessments Completed/ Awarded |
Average Time Taken |
|
Housing Benefit New Claims |
312 |
13.33 days |
|
Council Tax Reduction New Claims |
865 |
35.99 days |
|
Discretionary Housing Payments |
203 |
28 days |
|
Emergency Limited Assistance Scheme |
838 |
2 days |
|
Open Access Household Support Fund |
3,425 |
14 days |
- Landlord Portal (CA-LL) Module now fully live. Paper schedules were switched off after 7th July.
Between 1st July – 30th Sept 2025, 87% of all incoming calls to our Contact Centre were answered, and 88% of prioritised services calls were answered.
Between 1st July – 30th Sept 2025, 69% of all calls answered waited less than 5 minutes. However, during our busiest times of the day 12.00 pm and 2.00 pm, this reduced to 63% of all calls waited less than 5 minutes.
Between 1st July – 30th Sept 2025, the average waiting time to see a Customer Service Advisor in one of our One Stop Shops was 20 minutes.
Between 1st July – 30th Sept 2025, Customer Services received 5 stage 1 complaints. All of these, 100%, were answered within the target, 15 days. We received 0 stage 2 complaints.
In our most recent Customer Service User Experience Survey, in May 2025:
- a very high number of respondents, at both sites, said that their query was fully resolved during their visit (over 96% in Bootle & 98% in Southport)
- 100% of respondents were either ‘Very Satisfied’ or ‘Fairly Satisfied’ with their interaction with a Customer Services Advisor
- over 99% of respondents in Bootle, and 100% in Southport, were ‘Very Satisfied’ or ‘Fairly Satisfied’ with the whole experience of interacting with Sefton Council via Customer Services during their visit
- 6% of all respondents said they did feel they had been treated fairly
Recent feedback received from our customers during our Customer Service User Experience Survey, highlighted the difficulties some of our customers experience in trying to access Sefton’s online services. Throughout the period 1st July – 30th Sept 2025, we’ve continued to implement further improvements to our new Taxi Licensing portal. We’ve also been working with our partners in other departments to improve their online services and we will continue to provide digital assistance to all customers who genuinely require it.