Customer Service Excellence

Hasmonean High School achieved the new Cabinet Office quality mark for public services
- the Customer Service Excellence award - in January 2010.

The Customer Service Excellence standard lies at the heart of a government strategy to provide public services which are "efficient, effective, excellent, equitable and empowering", and which put "the citizen always and everywhere at the heart of public service provision". At Hasmonean, our customers include our students and parents, but also all those who come into contact with us whether as visitors, suppliers or members of the local community. The school decided to work towards achieving Customer Service Excellence status as the standard will help us define and implement customer-focused best practices, and also provide us with a formal means to help us monitor compliance and evaluate our performance.

As a school with a strong community ethos, Hasmonean is committed to:

• Providing a service that is customer-focused, professional and responsive to feedback
• Treating all our customers with courtesy, respect and consideration
• Providing a wide range of services and facilities to support the diversity of our customer needs
• Ensuring that customers can access services and information in the most efficient manner
• Resolving any issues as quickly and efficiently as possible within a reasonable time frame.

The five key criteria of the Customer Service Excellence standard against which our performance was measured over the course of 2009 are:

1. Customer insight
2. The culture of the organisation
3. Information and access
4. Delivery
5. Timeliness and quality of service.

Working with the standard is helping us to:

• Drive forward our customer service transformation
• Develop the culture of the school
• Motivate all our staff and recognise their achievements
• Benchmark and share best practice
• Focus on consistency and performance across the whole school.

A recent specific example of improving access to information was the implementation last August of a system to enable students to access their public exam results electronically. This service was provided for the first time via the school's information management system. We are also publishing for the first time strategic reviews and evaluations of the school's achievements in headline areas of education along with the steps we plan to implement to improve our performance.

New services for our customers will include the implementation of a password-protected area on this site which will allow our parents to access, for example, results of surveys we have carrried out.

Links

Ruth Kelly MP visits Hasmonean in October 2009.