Councillor Mareeta Grundy is looking into the subject of Customer Service and has raised a Question on Notice with the staff which will be discussed at tomorrow night’s Council meeting.
My experience with the first level support at QPRC has been particularly good for the most part.
Michael Goiser who runs the Help Desk team has a strong customer service focus, and the people who work for him have a great phone manner, show a lot of empathy and common sense, and answer questions well.
The wheels fall off when the question you are asking needs to be referred to somebody who doesn’t answer phones for a living.
According to Council staff 20% of customer questions need to be passed on because they cannot be answered from a knowledgebase. These questions are primarily related to road issues and Development Applications.
Michael and his people use the Customer Request Management component of the Property Rating module from TehcnologyOne to create problem tickets, which they then assign to the relevant QPRC department for resolution.
For the 5,000+ issues reported via SnapSendSolve, the Help Desk manually copies the report into the TechnologyOne platform, get the ticket incident number, and then paste that number back into SnapSendSolve.
Once the incident is recorded in the TechnologyOne platform, residents have absolutely no visibility to see whether the ticket accurately reflects what they reported, how it is progressing or whether it remains open.
From experience, once a ticket is created there is next to no chance the problem will be resolved without the resident having to follow-up multiple times, yet according to Richards and Flint who answered Cr. Grundy’s Question on Notice, there is apparently a “dashboard” that managers use to make sure that every open ticket gets closed, but that in future the Council will be moving to the Cloud.
I am not sure why this question wasn’t answered by Michael, and looking past the fact that it doesn’t really answer the question asked, I was told by Michael last September that the Council was already in the Cloud, he also suggests that his predecessor was unable to get their software vendor to provide reporting.
It appears that the response by Richards and Flint doesn’t accurately represent the situation, but it begs the question of why staff would misrepresent the systems that they have in place.
It’s not as if staff will get into trouble for saying that Council are using a system designed for rating properties to track customer service requests, that the system is not fit for purpose, and that once a ticket is assigned it never really goes anywhere because the backend people don’t use it.
As luck would have it my wife has a one-month-old SnapSendSolve that still hadn’t been resolved so I decided to put it to the test. It came as no surprise that nobody seemed to know about the dashboard.
This is how it went…
So why misrepresent the situation? Surely setting an unrealistic expectation only puts the Council and the staff in legal jeopardy?
Having dealt with QPRC for nearly 5 years, I have racked my brain to come up with a rational explanation as to why someone would rather stray into the realm of fraud when they can happily exist in the realm of mediocracy.
Today I came to the realisation that while there might not be any consequence for mediocracy, in the mindset of senior Council staff the cost-benefit of potentially being accused of fraud outweighs the risk that somebody might expect more than mediocracy and ask staff to deliver something better, and it’s not as if anybody is going to accuse them of fraud anyway.
Having a dashboard to track the resolution of problem tickets so that the Council stays within its commitments under the Customer Service Charter is a level of competency not achieved by many Fortune 500 corporations. If the Council has these systems in place, then kudos to them, but if these systems are in place why has my wife’s ticket, that I am told was assigned to a category with a 2-hour service level been sitting around for over a month?
The reason my wife’s ticket has been sitting around, and the reason it would still be sitting around if I had not called today has little to do with a lack of effort by Michael and his people, to suggest otherwise would not be fair on them.
Tomorrow night before the Council Meeting the staff will tell the Councillors that there is no problem because Council has best practice systems in place, and most of the Councillors will take that at face value.
Councillor Grundy and Macdonald will then argue that what they are hearing from the residents doesn’t correlate with the claims that the systems are working (or even exist), and the other Councillors will argue that the staff have to manage the expectations of those who are unhappy.
The upshot of all of this is that the senior staff will not have to actually implement what everybody now thinks exists already, which is far less work than actually delivering more than vaporware.
I stopped keeping file notes of my council calls that did not result in a call back.
Waste, water, DA’s you name it.
You can get a bin replaced 🙂
They will lie to your face.
I’ve been there at the counter showing a map to the head planner – who could not accept that there was a HOUSE built immediately in a zone that is the zoned green space. They just quietly let some people through. It’s personal.
They have vendettas
Our failed DA’s are spewing with evidence of vendettas. They decide they don’t like someone and they burrow in.
QPRC are incompetent and can’t see the wood for the trees.
Only deep pockets can handle a DA with QPRC – it’s always a battle and a fight and they will tie you up in so much red tape not even a 10 season Netflix show could unravel it.
Thanks for your response Jacqui.
It is important that residents share their stories and it is important that they have somewhere to share them.