In September, the Brothers of Charity Services in Lancashire received a full re-accreditation visit from the Customer Service Excellence (CSE), carried out by Hugh Keachie. The Customer Service Excellence standard encourages organisations to focus on the individual needs and preferences of the service users.
Due to Covid19 the assessment was carried out electronically, but this didnt stop us performing to the highest standard. As well as a full desk top review, Hugh Keachie electronically met with a number of staff, partners and customers via Zoom, phone call, or written statement.
Our Lancashire Services received the accreditation based on 5 key categories: Customer Insight, the Culture of the Organisation, Information & Access, Delivery & Timelines and Quality of Service.
In addition Hugh is recommending the Brothers of Charity Services in Lancashire are Compliant Plus with the following elements:
We have developed customer insight about our customer groups to better understand their needs and preferences.
Each location nominated a link person and the community engagement team would ensure contact and liaise with to offer additional support to staff and people we support about how they can maintain their emotional wellbeing, share ideas around positive activities, ask about what technology they have in the location and gain ideas that can be shared service wide. This level of engagement went above and beyond normal practice in response to the impact of social distancing measures and the benefit ensured the person centered approach of the Service continued to be delivered in line with its ethos vision and values.
We make particular efforts to identify hard to reach and disadvantaged groups and individuals and have developed our services in response to their specific needs.
Due to lockdown restrictions the people we support were at risk of being isolated and their health and wellbeing needs impacted. All staff teams have worked tirelessly, remaining committed to ensuring positive engagement with the people we support. Each location nominated a link person and the advocacy and community engagement team would ensure contact and liaise with to offer additional support to staff and people we support about how they can maintain their emotional wellbeing, share ideas that can be shared service wide.
This is innovative for the Service in this unique situation as we have never utilised technology to this extent in terms of customer engagement. The benefits were the excellent variety of virtual activity using Zoom and this incredible positive response generated in an incredibly challenging situation allowed us a good reach to our customers to make a positive impact. The team put the needs to the clients first to ensure that positive engagement remained high in light of the global pandemic.
We have made positive changes to services as a result of analysing customer experience, including improved customer journeys.
The necessity of increased access to technology generated by lockdown restrictions has actually opened up a whole new level of positive engagement for the service. As lockdown measures evolve on a local and national level people have been very well supported to access zoom and by using that and other technology it has filled a gap in day services caused by social distancing requirements. This take service delivery to a new level and ensures that client needs remain at the focus of activity and we remain responsive to needs and preferences in a person centred way. It’s also provided great skills development and increased confidence for many people both staff and the people we support and brought so much joy to everyone. This is continuing to occur and adds value to the Services that we deliver on a daily basis, enhancing people’s lives and building community.
We value the contribution our staff make to delivering customer focused services, and leaders, managers and staff demonstrate these behaviours.
The contribution our workforce has made during the global pandemic has been exceptional. Whilst each individual will undoubtedly have had their own challenges to face they have continued to deliver amazing services to the people we support under unprecedented challenges. The positive engagement & innovation has been ongoing across the Services and recognised in a variety of ways including pay uplifts, thank you messages and gift bags, thank you videos from clients and a special edition newsletter celebrating extra mile stories.
The videos created by the people we support thanking their staff colleagues and loved ones are incredibly moving and demonstrate the activity and feeling of positive engagement that went on during lockdown. They speak volumes about the excellent service levels delivered by our front line workforce in circumstances that changed the world. They bring to life the ethos, vision and values of the service, reinforcing and reminding everyone of the positive culture that is embedded in our values and should be continuously celebrated as an example to all.
We provide our customers wit the information they need in ways which meet their needs and preferences, using a variety of appropriate channels.
The advocacy team and SelectionBOCS staff collaborated to produce a video demonstrating the PPE that paramedics will be wearing when they attend patients. This is a responsive and effective way to help stop people being afraid when paramedics attend. It is innovative for BOCS as this method of delivery is new and impressive due to the visual delivery of key messages and the ease of circulation and access. The North West Ambulance Service were so impressed by the video they identified a gap in their own resources and produced their own version based on the video produced by BOCS.
We have made arrangements with other providers and partners to offer and supply co-ordinated services, and these arrangements have demonstrated benefits for our customers.
At BOCS we have many people who are in both supported living and attend day services provided by BOCS. When these services were cancelled we raised the fact that the people we support would need additional hours of support to maintain safe services due to them now needing to be at home when they would normally be supported by a day service. It was identified quickly that the normal process of calling the customer care line within LCC would not be effective as they were struggling with capacity and it was taking over an hour to get through.
LCC have a system where they can only discuss one person per call. We would then need to wait for allocation of a social worker before any funding could be looked at. We identified that this would not allow us to put the required provision in quickly so we spoke with the Social services manager around utilising the day service budgets that were currently in place to enable us to convert that funding into required 1-1 hours. After discussion and a Zoom call it was agreed that we could proceed on that basis. Covid THC’s (Tenancy hour’s calculators -a tool for monitoring service delivery) were then produced for each tenancy evidencing how the funding was being diverted into hours to maintain safe services. This was an exceptional innovative piece of work that resulted in ensuring service levels remained high under extraordinary & challenging circumstances.
Many thanks to our staff colleagues from across our Lancashire Services for your support with this process and achievement of the accreditation. The positive contribution in maintaining high levels of quality care and compliance for the people we support is greatly appreciated.
