An hour well spent” – training time!

“An hour well spent” – the Council’s Customer Service Advisers (CSA) have been adding to their breadth of service knowledge thanks to weekly training sessions.

For the past six months, the CSA’s have been taking part in dedicated training sessions from 9am-10am on Wednesdays.

This has included:

• training with other teams within the Council - transport and Young Scot concessionary travel forms, Environmental Health, Arts, Museums & Culture, Finance systems – invoices, Council Tax and rents, housing repairs;

• team training – Customer Service Platform – customer accounts, duplicate records, Self/MyOrkney and MyGovScot for customer access, star rating feedback, building and testing forms and processes; team procedures eg. health & safety, fire, risk assessments, dealing with unacceptable behaviour etc.; cost of living grants; Blue Badge training; 

• external training – violence and aggression training and digital applications support.

Further training is planned over the coming weeks with the Development and Marine Planning teams and Business Gateway.

Thanks to the Customer Services survey feedback recently, we know how valued the staff are by the public – this is hoped will give CSA’s an even wider breadth of knowledge to be able to further assist customers.

Team Manager of Customer Services is Catherine Foubister. She said: “It may be only an hour, but it is an hour well spent each week on dedicated training on a wide range of internal and external services.

“It is an instant success story as staff are able to pass on the benefits to customers immediately – it is enabling us to offer a much more streamlined and efficient service to the public and we have seen their gratitude in the comments and feedback from the recent survey.

“I am delighted that we have been allowed to have this dedicated time, which has proven itself to be so worthy. It’s a rolling programme, so staff will be continually learning and improving our offer to folk – if they cannot answer the query directly, then they know who to contact in a more targeted and efficient way. A win-win for both CSAs and customers.”