By David Wallace, Chief Customer Officer, at SLC
At SLC, we value the feedback we receive from our customers, so it felt very fitting to discuss customer expectations when our new Customer Panel met for its first session of 2024.
The panel's membership has recently been refreshed, with many coming to the end of their tenures in 2023, so it was great to welcome some new faces representing prospective, current, and former students. I'm grateful to them for their commitment and support.
The Customer Panel, which has members from across Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales, is key to our pledge of improving customer experience. It's just one of the ways we listen to our customers and ensure their views are reflected in the decisions we make about the service we provide.
The focus of the January meeting was customer expectations and panel members listened to SLC Service Owners talk about their roles in our Customer Experience team and the work we are doing to make things better for customers.
Topics covered included our new digital customer journey for sponsors - the parents and spouses of customers - which will make it easier and faster for them to support the customer's assessment for maintenance funding. We also talked about how we are supporting customers with additional support needs and our preparations for the introduction of the UK government's flagship Lifelong Learning Entitlement policy.
Panel members were then invited to discuss the content of the presentation and share their views and thoughts on what they had heard and to tell us about their own service expectations of SLC.
The Customer Panel will sit for two years with its current membership, meeting on a quarterly basis. And if the first meeting is anything to go by, I am looking forward to some interesting sessions and discussions in the months ahead.
