3 Promoting consistency across the
network
17. While the Council has pockets of excellence,
it agreed with the National Audit Office's findings that it has
problems in ensuring consistent standards across its global network.[29]
To help address this problem, the Council has reorganised its
business from 110 disparate country operations into 12 regions.
The corporate centre in London now has dealings with 12 regions,
rather than 110 countries. Each region is headed by a Regional
Director who is responsible for ensuring that corporate policies
are consistently applied and that each country within the region
delivers against the set programmes. The Council has also introduced
a new agreement between the Regional Director and the corporate
centre, which sets out the contribution that each region is expected
to make towards the delivery of the Council's corporate outcomes.[30]
18. While the move from countries to regions is starting
to improve consistency, the Council's tools for assessing performance
are not applied in the same way across all Regions. The Council
measures customer feedback after some of its events, but staff
have wide discretion over which events to obtain feedback. To
prevent bias in the measurement process, in most cases, the Council
decides before the event whether to collect customer feedback.[31]
19. Customer evaluation is, however, only one of
the ways in which the Council attempts to evaluate its work. It
collects customer satisfaction data through, for example, its
teaching and examinations business, and uses an Evaluations of
Long-Term Outcomes (ELTOS) to collect information on the broader
impact of the Council's work. The ELTOS programme is run by an
external survey organisation so as not to influence responses.
The Council is also working with the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office on how to better measure the impact of its work on public
diplomacy. In this difficult to measure area, the Council is generally
regarded as being ahead of comparator organisations from other
countries.[32]
20. In a customer-facing organisation such as the
Council, which has contact with over 15 million people per year,
it is important for it to be able to manage and track its customer
contacts and deliver good customer service standards. The Council
has a target of answering all emails within seven days and all
telephone calls within two minutes. It estimates that it is only
meeting these standards in around three-quarters of customer contacts,
and is not meeting them consistently across its network. In the
last year, only 10 out of 12 regions improved their customer satisfaction
scores. The Council looks to its Regional Directors to raise customer
service standards across their region. For example, the Middle
East Region has put in place Customer Service Managers in each
office and is running a Customer Service Excellence Project. The
Council is also moving from an annual to a quarterly 'mystery
shopping' survey to identify earlier those regions which are not
meeting their targets. Once the Council has achieved a consistent
level of satisfaction across all 12 regions, it will then concentrate
on raising overall standards.[33]
21. The Council does not have a single, integrated
system for recording its customer contact information. In order
to measure how many new contacts it had made in a year, it would
have to interrogate multiple systems, mainly at the country level.[34]
The Council has a customer relationship management project to
investigate a global solution, but this is currently two years
behind schedule. The delay is partly due to the complexity and
scale of developing a global system which can collate customer
contact details across 110 countries, and partly from the Council
being understandably reluctant to commission an IT solution until
they have a clear specification.[35]
22. The Council has so far spent around £300,000
on its customer relationship management project, but is prudent
in being unwilling to commit further funds to develop an IT solution
until the technical specification has been adequately defined.
The Council is running pilot programmes in China and Europe to
investigate how it could deliver a joined-up customer relationship
management system and to define its requirements, such as the
type of information the Council will need to collect on its customers,
and what is the most effective way of keeping in touch with its
different types of customers.[36]
23. The Council admitted that some staff were becoming
frustrated with the slow pace of change. The risk in further delaying
an integrated customer relationship management system is that
countries and regions may start to develop their own systems,
which must then be integrated into a corporate solution, once
this has been developed. The Council is relying on its Regional
Directors to engage with corporate programmes, and pointed to
its IT controls which manage the creation of ad hoc new database
systems.[37]
29 Q 43 Back
30
Qq 43, 55 Back
31
Qq 66-67, C&AG's Report, paras 3.10-3.11 Back
32
Qq 66-67, C&AG's Report, paras 3.2-3.3 Back
33
Qq 58, 70-72 Back
34
Q 59 Back
35
Qq 60, 135 Back
36
Qq 60, 135 Back
37
Q 61 Back
|
