SIS was one of the first charities in England to apply for the Customer Service Excellence (CSE) Award https://www.customerserviceexcellence.uk.com/
There is a rigorous external validation that looks at how we work with NHS and Local Authority customers, service users and staff.
We use the criteria to sustain improvement and innovation. We have done this every year since 2009 and built up a momentum over 10 years.
Our external Assessor Neil met with key stakeholders before joining us again at our AGM and 25 year celebrations. He commented on how this helped him to witness directly the genuine customer service we pride ourselves on and the spontaneous feedback and testimonials of service users.
Last year we were awarded 5 areas of Compliance Plus (CP+). We are absolutely thrilled to achieve these again and to add a further Compliance Plus for our wellbeing work with staff. We adapted a CIPD (Chartered Institute of Professional Development) Job Quality Index, set aside personal wellbeing budgets for all staff and contracted a small wellbeing space within Community Base.
Neil emphasised that it is far from automatic to maintain a CP+, it requires evidence of sustained improvement during the year.
These are our 6 areas of Compliance Plus:
• We have made positive changes to services as a result of analysing customer experience, including improved customer journeys.
• We use customer insight to inform policy and strategy and to prioritise service improvement
• We empower and encourage all employees to actively promote and participate in the customer-focused culture of our organisation.
• We interact within wider communities and we can demonstrate the ways in which we support those communities.
• We have made arrangements with other providers and partners to offer and supply coordinated services, and these arrangements have demonstrable benefits for our customers.
• We have developed insight about our staff to better understand their needs and preferences.
Our key challenge in the year ahead is to further develop social impact measures that demonstrates how we empower our service users.
Once again we invite our competitors to publish details of any externally validated quality assurance awards they hold and their Net Promoter Score!
Thank you to our commissioners, partners, service users, staff and community linguists for meeting with our Assessor. Your feedback is so valuable and appreciated.
Well done to everyone who works hard to make SIS so successful in delivering language support at the heart of our communities.
A very special thank you to Vikki Gimson our Quality Assurance Manager who manages the process with such skill.
We welcome feedback. You can give us your feedback by visiting our Contact web page https://sussexinterpreting.org.uk/feedback/
Arran Evans – SIS Director arran@sussexinterpreting.org.uk
