Please introduce yourself
My name Is Allan Drew and I have been involved with Customer Service for the past 30 years. I have spent the last 5 years in Lambeth, which was my first public sector role. Previously I have worked for BT and also run my own small business providing consultancy on customer service

Can you explain what your role is?
In Lambeth I run the parts of the council responsible for resident contact. So the call centre and the walk-in customer centres in Brixton and Streatham are part of my operation, where we handle about 2m contacts/year with Lambeth residents. I also have responsibility for facilities management which involves the smooth running of the council’s 15 major office buildings.


What do you find is the most challenging part of your job?
Working successfully across other departments in the council to produce the best result for the customer. Not because colleagues do not want to help, but rather that every part of the council has a significant improvement activity to be getting on with and ensuring it all fits together and everything gets done is quite a challenge

What part of your job do you find the most rewarding?
Like other local authorities we get complaints in Lambeth. But we also get compliments from customers and these are great to receive. Often these compliments result from a staff member who went the extra mile to sort out some problem for a resident and that is the essence of good customer service.

How do you feel Lambeth Council has improved customer service?
During my 5 years at Lambeth we have come a long way. In 2004 only about 50 % of the telephone calls were answered, now it is 96%. We had no idea how long it took to answer a call, now we know that in February the average time to answer was 20 seconds. Our 2 new walk in centres at Brixton and Streatham are good examples of one stop shops and have been visited by many other councils, central government people and even overseas delegations, as operations which display best practice.

What is the basic minimum service, a service user should expect to receive?
A user should be dealt with promptly by a knowledgeable individual who can resolve the issue to the satisfaction of that user. Sometimes this means just giving some information, but often it consists of some further action, such as fixing a problem for a tenant. In these cases the basic service consists of making a “promise” (to resolve the problem) on behalf of the council and having that promise kept (someone arrives on the appointed day to fix the problem). Customers usually become upset if the promise is not properly made or is not kept.

What does community mean to you?
To me it means a group of individuals connected by some common interest or purpose. Here in Lambeth it means the common interest of creating a Borough in which we enjoy living and working and where people can go about their business with a level of independence of their choice.

What is Lambeth Council’s vision for customer service in the future?
Somewhat paradoxically my vision for customer service in Lambeth is that we have less of it – but for the right reasons. When a resident contacts us it is often (though not always) because something has gone wrong. So a housing repair is required, or a family has become homeless, or there is a problem with bin collection. If we can all work together to reduce the need for people to make such calls then for me that would be a sign of genuine progress.

What would you like to do if you weren’t working in the Customer Service sector?
As a professional engineer (many years ago!) I would like to run a small engineering business, maybe a boatyard, a garage or a machine shop.

What are the biggest challenges facing customer service at the moment?
Customer service sometimes struggles to justify its role. In many organisations it is seen as just a cost or a support service with the “real” business being done elsewhere. 20 years ago customer service meant receptionists at the front desk or the complaints department. We have come on from that position but many managers in all industries have not yet recognised the fundamental importance of customer service in creating the relationship between the customer and the organisation and helping to ensure that customers receive the services they are paying for.

What is a typical day in the office for you?
I travel in from Bedfordshire and arrive around 8.30am. At 9am I hold the daily performance meeting where I discuss the previous day’s results with my managers and see if there are any problems we need to iron out to improve future performance. There will then be a number of meetings through the day reviewing progress on key projects, developing plans for future service improvements and ensuring that service results and financial spending are in line with what we expect. If not we have to agree and implement actions to fix the problems. I will visit parts of the operation to hear how others think we are doing and in between times keep up with e-mails and telephone calls.

What 3 words sum up your ambition for customer service.
Fast, friendly and reliable

What CD would you have at home in your CD player at the moment?
Yiruma – River flows in you, plus some other of his pieces

What do you think is the most important aspect of working in Customer Services?
When I recruit people for service work I concentrate on their attitude to customers and colleagues. I am looking for someone who builds understanding with others and is a good listener and able to see both sides of an issue. I don’t really care about the skills people have – we can teach new recruits the stuff they need to know. But if people don’t bring the right attitude that is much harder to change.

If you could adapt your role, what would you introduce?
In customer service we see all the problems in the organisation (including the ones we create ourselves!). The reason is that when anything goes wrong the residents contact us to get the problem resolved. So we handle many contacts which reflect shortcomings in the organisation. Rather than treating these calls as a problem I see them as a real opportunity for improvement – any serious service organisation would be keen to study these contacts, understand the reasons for them and then fix the underlying problems. This activity however, requires skills which are not directly service related. Rather they are analytic skills associated with processes and consequently with IT and computer systems. In my ideal world I would ensure these improvement teams were able to work across the organisation rooting out the problems and getting them fixed. Currently these people don’t really exist in Lambeth and this is an area which requires our early attention.

What was the last book you read?
Fiction “A most wanted man” by John le Carré. Non fiction “History of the English speaking peoples” by Winston S Churchill.

How has the ‘Lambeth Promise’ improved communication with customers contacting the service centre?
It is still early days to see an effect from the “Lambeth Promise” but we have a number of programmes running which will start to make the Promise real. First there is the issue of measurement. The Promise is aspirational and unless we can measure how well we are doing against these aspirations we will not stand much chance of actually achieving improvement. So early in January I organised a mystery shopping exercise across all the council’s advertised telephone and e-mail contact points (not just the service centres). We asked the mystery shoppers to assess how well the Promise was met during their contact with the council. The results were mixed, with some areas doing very well and other areas needing to improve. We will repeat this exercise every 3 months and all services will be expected to improve their scores. To help deliver this improvement we have just started a council wide programme to help establish more customer responsive behaviour in all council staff who regularly deal with residents. I believe these 2 programmes taken together will make the Lambeth Promise increasingly effective over the next 6-12 months

Do you think more could be done to integrate and encourage communication between residents associations?

More can always be done. But I think the associations have to be clear what they are there for. On the one hand an association needs to champion the particular issues in its area and be a strong voice for the residents it represents. On the other hand by acting in some form of combination there is likely to be more opportunities to influence council policies and programmes. Both aspects have advantages and disadvantages, but generally working in combination is more difficult to achieve simply because of the number of people involved. Here is where I think there may well be opportunities to encourage associations to work together more effectively. The council has to make some decisions quite soon about how television services will be delivered to tenants once traditional analogue services are replaced by digital around 2012-13. The current views are that TVs will cease to be just receivers of broadcast services and become much more a window on the digital world, almost certainly handling internet services as well. With some help from Lambeth this change could easily help create groups and on-line communities equipped with the means to work together much more effectively than is typically possible now. Personally I would encourage associations to keep a close eye on proposals to upgrade the TV systems so that benefits such as I have described are incorporated into the new systems.

Who inspires you?
Over my 40 year career quite a few people. I was trained as a scientist and engineer and the story of John Harrison who made the first accurate sea going clock in 1735 and so enabled the measurement of longitude for ships, is very appealing. This is one of the most elegant combinations of science and engineering that I know and it saved many lives at sea. Later I was hugely inspired by one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century- the story of how mankind came to understand simultaneously how the very large –planets, stars and galaxies – are connected to the very small – atoms and fundamental particles – in ways that are completely outside our normal experiences. Some of the people contributing to this great quest helped me realise that often obvious explanations are not in fact correct. Beware of jumping to conclusions!

If residents are unhappy with the customer service they receive, how can they complain? Similarly, if they would like to comment on good service, how can they do this?
There are a number of ways to register comments and complaints with us. One easy way if you have internet access is to go to the website www.lambeth.gov.uk and use the “Contact us” link which will take you to the pages you can use to report your issue. You can also call us on 7926 1000 and at the automated voice prompt ask for “Complaints”. This will connect you to the switchboard and your call will then be directed to whichever Department can best deal with your issue. If you visit one of our Customer Centres in Brixton or Streatham the staff there will aim to resolve any problems, but you can complete a complaint /comment form if you wish.