Customer Services

What We Do

The Customer Services Team (part of Customer Services & Communications) run our Customer Services Centre and work to improve the customer experience of contacting and dealing with us.

The Centre opened in April 2006 as part of the Customers First project and currently supports seven front-line Service Units, handling over 200,000 calls and emails a year for over 200 key Council services.

Our Advisers also provide our switchboard and Civic Centre Reception services, so you will probably encounter them when you contact us.

Real People - Based In Poole

Our highly-trained Advisers use a sophisticated system and boroughofpoole.com to assist customers with their enquiries, as well as taking payments and arranging specialist services with other units or external contractors.

You will always be answered by a real person, based here in Poole - so there is no "Press 1 for this or Press 2 for that"! However, if we're really busy and cannot answer your call quickly, you will be given the option to leave a message for us to call you back.

Occasionally, we may play a key message before we answer your call (for example to advise that we are already aware of a road being flooded) to help save time for customers who do not then need to speak with us.

Wider Service Availability

Many of our services are now available from 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, as detailed in our A-Z Guide, making it much easier for you to contact us now.

This includes such things as bin enquiries, street lighting and public toilets. You can also renew library books during this period, even if your local library is closed, which has increased the hours of service on the telephone by 42%!

We have also worked hard to improve the content and range of facilities available on this website, which is available 24 hours a day. You can find a huge range of information here and also Apply for, Pay for and Report issues about hundreds of our services, whenever it suits you.

Developing Improved Services

Our Service Development sub-team designs, develops and maintains the systems and processes needed to provide these services. They careful monitor customer feedback, call patterns and ideas from our advisers to identify problems and potential improvements.

Detailed planning for the next phase of Customers First is now underway, considering potential improvements to even more services over the next few years, for example those for children, social care and benefits management. And we are already improving the self service facilities available on this website, check these out on our Do It Online page.

What You Think

Customer feedback is very important to us and we survey a sample of callers each month. Everyone who emails us is also invited to complete an online survey - if you've contacted us recently, why not give it a go?

This will help us to keep track of how well we're doing and what else we could do to make things even better. We're encouraged to hear that the vast majority of you are very happy with the service you receive from us - for example in September 2007, the average satisfaction of 80 customers surveyed was just under 91%.

The Poole Opinion Panel is composed of around 1,300 local residents and reported on their experience of contacting us in Summer 2007. They told us that some major improvements had been delivered now, which also helped raise overall satisfaction with the Council (already one of the best rated in the country) to 78%.