Council wins national award for excellence

Govmetric - the national system used to measure customer satisfaction - declared the Council "a case study in excellence."  

In honour of this accolade, officials presented the Council's Customer Service Staff with a certificate, trophy and some chocolates.  

This is the Council's third successive major mark of national recognition for customer satisfaction from the national assessor, Govmetric.  

Last year, the organisation awarded a 'gong' to the Council for making the most of its communication with customers.  

This was on top of the previous year's success when the Council won the Govmetric Council of the Year Award 2009.  

For the latest award Govmetric praised the Council for continually improving the way it captures the views of customers and acts on the results.

Officials said: "We were really impressed with the staff engagement work that Southend-on-Sea Borough Council have been doing.  

"They actively educate and brief their staff in the importance of collecting customer insights, continuously measure individual staff involvement and have integrated this into their formal appraisal processes."  

"More importantly we can see that staff have better visibility of the entire insight process."  

Southend-on-Sea Borough Council's Executive Councillor for Corporate Support Services, Councillor Andrew Moring says: "This terrific award is a tribute to the hard work of all our staff in customer-facing roles who take on board customer feedback. 

"Many congratulations to staff and customers for their invaluable contributions.  

"We are very grateful to our customers for giving us their feedback. As this award indicates, we train our staff not just to take all these responses very seriously, but to monitor them, and to follow up issues raised.