Sefton Council Customer Service Standards Charter

At Sefton Council, we are committed in providing a high-quality of service to all our customers. Our Customer Service Standards Charter sets out the standard of customer service that you can expect and the aims that we constantly strive toward.

Our Commitment 

We will: 

• Be polite, helpful, and professional.
• Handle your enquiry in confidence and respect your right to privacy.
• Provide you with accurate advice and information.
• Aim to get it right first time, so you don’t need to contact us again.
• We will try and resolve your enquiry at the first point of contact.
• Do what we say we will do and when we say we will do it.
• Help you receive the services that you need.
• Use your preferred method of contact when we communicate with you.

Skilled staff

All our staff are required to complete various mandatory training courses to ensure that they have the right skills and knowledge to do their job. This will include annual training refresher courses in Information & Compliance, Equality and Diversity and General Data Protection Regulations.

When You Contact Us

Sefton Council’s preferred method of contact is through our online services on our website. We constantly strive to make the online customer journey accessible, user friendly and easy to use. However, help is on-hand via our Contact Centre or One Stop Shops for customers who are unable to access our online services.  

Our residents and customers can now benefit from an online service called, My Account, where users can now gain immediate access to their Council Tax, Business Rates and Benefit accounts.

When You Call Us

Sefton Council prioritises telephone calls from our most vulnerable residents who need our help most and our telephony is configured to answer those calls first. These are generally calls relating to Emergency Limited Assisted Scheme (ELAS), Household Support Fund and all Social Care enquiries.

• For our prioritised services, we aim to answer all calls within two minutes.
• We aim to answer at least 90% of all prioritised services calls received by our Contact Centre.

For all other telephone calls:

• We will aim to answer your telephone call within five minutes, however this may not be possible during our busier times of the day, such as 12.00 pm to 2.00 pm.
• We aim to answer at least 80% of all telephone calls that are received by our Contact Centre.
• We will let you know if you are in a queue and how long you could expect to wait for your call to be answered.
• If specialist advice is needed, a call-back will be offered within 24-hours.
• There will always be someone to help in the event of an emergency. Our Out-of-Hours team are available to deal with emergencies when our Contact Centre is closed.

When You Visit our One Stop Shops

• We aim to greet you within two minutes of your arrival and then start dealing with your enquiry within 15-minutes.
• If there any excessive delays, we will explain the reason and provide you with an estimated waiting period.
• If you have an appointment, we aim to keep to your appointment time to ensure that you do not have to wait.

When You Contact Us by Email 

• You will receive an immediate automated response confirming that we have received your communication.
• The automated response will confirm how long you may expect to wait for a response.
• We will aim to respond to your email within 5-working days.

When you complete our Customer Compliments and Complaints Form

• You will receive an automated response confirming that we have received your compliment or complaint.
• We will provide you with a reference number so you can keep track of your complaint.
• We will provide a full response within 15 days of receipt – this is known as Stage 1
• If you are dissatisfied with the response that you receive, you may request that it is reviewed by a senior officer – this is known as stage 2
• At stage 2 we will provide a full response within 10 days of receipt, however we may issue a holding response if further time is needed.
• If you are not happy with the stage 2 response, we will provide you with the details to contact the Local Government Ombudsman.   

Customer Feedback  

In order to maintain high quality customer service, it is important to seek frequent improvements where possible. We welcome customer feedback in any form, as an important source of ideas for improvement. For example, recent feedback received from our customers during one of our bi-annual Customer Service User Experience Surveys, requested an online system to allow taxi drivers to upload their evidence and to pay for their licence fee from home.

Sefton have recently purchased a new online portal which will allow our many taxi drivers to do this – the implementation date for this new online portal will be 1^st April 2024.

Our Performance: October 2024 – December 2024

Charter Aims	(word 20KB)
Customer Services User Experience Survey Report Nov 2024	(word 427KB)

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