A customer satisfaction survey was sent to people who had contacted the Environmental Health service about a complaint or a question. Four hundred surveys were sent out between January 2006 and May 2006. Twenty three percent of people responded, which is fairly typical for postal surveys. Not all of the 92 surveys that were returned where fully completed.

Customer satisfaction was rated on five principles.

• How easy it was to contact us
• How quickly we responded
• How long we took to complete the complaint or enquiry
• The quality of the information we provided
• The manner of our staff
• The efforts we made to resolve the complaint or enquiry

People were asked to rate their satisfaction between very satisfied, satisfied, acceptable and poor. Graph 1 demonstrates that people are mostly very satisfied with our service. Graph 2 shows the average satisfaction and overall 90% of people are satisfied with the service we provide.

We also wanted to know if we had made a difference, Graph 3 shows that in 66% of cases we improved or solved the situation. If we didn't or couldn't resolve your query in 44% of the cases where were could we did explain why. We will be looking at better ways of trying to explain why we can't help.

The survey wanted to see if there was a gap between what you expect of us and how we match up to those expectations. Unfortunately the way we phrased the question, about peoples expectations, meant that most people said that most things were very important! Whilst we agree that the principles were all important we wanted to see if there was any particular area where we needed to priorities.

We also wanted to know who was using our service and Graph 4 shows that it is mostly people over 60 years old. This result may be weighted by those people who choose to respond to surveys.

The comments we got were generally positive, especially the helpfulness of our staff. There were a few cases where we didn't do so well and we responded directly to those people.

Comments included

"Helpful, friendly bloke who gave realistic advice, thanks"

"knowledgeable and pleasant staff

"Speed and importance staff gave to my request. Well Done"

Our results show that we are meeting our target of 90% customer satisfaction and we provide an all round good service. One area we do need to work on is explaining why in certain situations we can't help. This is usually because we do not have the powers or the information to help. The practicalities of passing on a complaint to a third party can be a problem as the third party often needs more information, so we do try and ask people to make the complaint or enquiry direct to that third party. For example an overflowing sewer in the main road should be reported to South West Water and they can need detailed descriptions of where the problem is.

Next steps

We will be changing our questionnaire so people who may enquiries to the service, rather than asking us to investigate a complaint are able to comment on the service they received. We will also include a set of specific questions on various topics related to Environmental Health that will change every six months or so.

If you have any questions about our results or the survey please contact us on 01803 861234.