St Helen's Council

When Julie Fox joined St.Helens Council, she quickly saw that there was an opportunity to focus attention on customer care training.

With many years’ experience in tourism and leisure, she brought a fresh perspective and was soon able to raise the profile of the issue within St. Helens Council.

Julie says: “There were small pockets of training taking place but no co-ordinated approach. I wanted to establish a training programme that was specific to the public sector and that was also accredited and proven to make a difference.”

Having taken part in ‘Welcome Host’ herself in the past, she knew that Welcome to Excellence were the UK leaders in customer service training and contacted Lancashire and Blackpool Tourist Board to investigate the possibility of creating a bespoke training scheme for local authorities.

Interest in the idea mushroomed and after winning an innovation bursary to pursue the development, Julie received grant funding and support from the Merseyside Capacity Building Group. As well as Merseyside Fire and Rescue,
this involved further local authorities in the project – The Wirral Council, Sefton Council and Knowsley Council.

So, with input from these three other local authorities, Julie worked with the Regional Tourist Board Partnerships to create the new course.

Julie says: “The new course is based on Welcome Host and contains a lot of the original activities but with a bit of a twist. The material has been refreshed with up to date facts and figures and customised to make it relevant to people working in local authorities including the overall context of local authorities and the importance of Customer Focus at the heart of everything we do.

“There has been quite a culture change in the public sector in recent years with much more awareness of the need to involve customers with the planning and delivery of services, encouraging feedback and two-way dialogue. The increasing importance of customer satisfaction is now very evident in the various performance indicators we measure our services against and performance assessments we undergo. Now councils are aiming to have much more interaction with customers and to get a real dialogue going to make sure that they are providing what their customers want. It is a time of real transformation for local authorities and this new course will help embed that into our culture.”

Within St.Helens Council, it is planned that ‘Welcome Host for Local Authorities’ will be delivered to all 8000 existing staff, with new recruits attending the course as part of their induction process.

Julie says: “We are taking a department – based approach to the roll out of the training, with in-house trainers for some quite service-specific departments such as Adult Social Care and Health, Planning and Registrars and Children and Young People’s Services.

“By taking a department based approach, the trainers can balance the messages of the course with any sensitivities related specifically to their own area of work. For example, if you are in Social Care and dealing with an emotional and sensitive tricky situation, this needs to be taken into account. Their training needs to be about more than ‘Smiling at the customer.’ However, the core customer care messages remain constant and can easily be applied right across the whole spectrum of local authority services.”

St.Helens Council begin rolling out their initial courses in Spring 2008.

It is encouraged by feedback from Knowsley and Wirral Councils, both of which have already started running ‘Welcome Host for Local Authorities’ courses.

Julie says: “The feedback has been fantastic. Staff have really enjoyed the courses and got tremendous benefit out of them. One aspect that people particularly enjoy is that the courses are interactive. A lot of other training is very systems specific but the Welcome to Excellence training is interactive and that adds to the overall impact.

I am very excited about this course and I am certain that ‘Welcome Host for Local Authorities’ can make a very significant difference to local authorities throughout England, helping them to put excellent customer service at the core of their operations.”