The City of Fremantle's outstanding customer service has been recognised with a major award at the Australian Institute of Management WA Pinnacle Awards.
The City's customer service team last week took out The West Australian Customer Service Excellence Award, which provides recognition for an organisation that has achieved outstanding results through key initiatives that demonstrate leadership and commitment to excellence in customer service.
Entry to the award was open to all organisations across the corporate, government, community and not-for-profit sectors in Australia that have a significant footprint in Western Australia.
Customer Service Manager Jay Ellis said the award was deserved recognition for the City's dedicated customer service team.
"At the end of the day the role of a local government is to provide services to its residents and ratepayers, so the guys at reception or in the call centre who are the first point of contact with the public are really important," Mr Ellis said.
"Everyone knows how frustrating it is to be waiting on hold for ages or to never be called back, so over the past two years we've worked really hard across the whole organisation to review our processes and update our systems to make sure requests and inquiries from the public are followed up and acted upon quickly and efficiently.
"As consequence we're now seeing some fantastic results and are delivering a first class customer service experience.
"To win this Pinnacle award, which covers not just local governments but the state government, corporate and community sectors as well, is deserved recognition for our incredibly committed customer service team and the whole organisation."
To improve our customer service the City of Fremantle has implemented a number of measures such as redesigning our website, introducing phone answering standards and streamlining procedures for responding to enquiries.
As a result customer surveys over the past two years have seen satisfaction with the City of Fremantle's customer service increase from 70 to 94 per cent.
Call wait times have been reduced from one minute to 10 seconds, and call volumes have gone down by 13.5 per cent because more callers are getting their query dealt with straight away and aren't needing to call back.
