Wow!
We have been awarded 17 areas of Compliance Plus in our Customer Service Excellence (CSE) independent external assessment. Our highest achievement ever.
This means we are in the top 5% of national assessments for all organisations of a comparable size and income level.
It is also confirmed that we are at THE TOP OF ALL COMMUNITY & VOLUNTARY SECTOR ORGANISATIONS WHO RECEIVE THE AWARD NATIONALLY!
What a way to celebrate 30 years of SIS! A fantastic acknowledgement of how hard we work to meet the needs of our beneficiaries.
The Customer Service Excellence quality mark aims to make a tangible difference to service users by encouraging organisations to focus on their individual needs and preferences.
Evidence is collected via a desktop submission and a whole day of interviews with; two directors, three managers, three service user-facing staff, two self-employed individuals providing interpreting, advocacy, bilingual social prescribing, and / or research, one service user, two volunteers, and two partners.
We take a whole team approach, investing in the process as part of our drive for continuous improvement and quality assurance.
The Assessor acknowledged that we had gone even further over the last year in many of the 15 areas of Compliance Plus we retained (listed below) .
The 2 new areas of Compliance Plus this year are:
- We have improved the range, content and quality of verbal, published and web based information we provide to ensure it is relevant and meets the needs of customers (Information & Access).
SIS has adopted multiple channels and resources to ensure service users receive and understand messages and continue to improve the accessibility of information, and ensure it is easy to understand. Interpreters check that the service user has all the information and understands what is expected. Quality assurance activities ensure that the information is accurate, complete, and easy to understand. An annual review of information provided ensures the information is current at the time of issue.
- We have developed and learned from best practice identified within and outside our organisation, and we publish our examples externally where appropriate (Delivery)
Whilst there are very few complaints (informal and formal), the Organisation uses them as learning opportunities and identifies solutions to the issues. The partners explained the value of having SIS at various meetings, as they share knowledge, experience, and information that others can learn from. Staff have delivered presentations to commissioners and other organisations, sharing their practices. SIS staff have learnt from the experience of others and, as a result, improved their practice.
The 15 other areas of Compliance Plus are:
Customer Insight:
- We have an in-depth understanding of the characteristics of our current and potential customer groups based on recent and reliable information.
- We have developed customer insight about our customer groups to better understand their needs and preferences.
- 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.
- We have made the consultation of customers integral to continually improving our service and we advise customers of the results and action taken.
- We have made positive changes to services as a result of analysing customer experience, including improved customer journeys.
Organisational Culture:
- We use customer insight to inform policy and strategy and to prioritise service improvement activity.
- We empower and encourage all employees to actively promote and participate in the customer focused culture of our organisation.
- Our staff are polite and friendly to customers and have an understanding of customer needs.
- We can demonstrate how customer facing staff insights, and experiences are incorporated into internal processes, policy development and service planning.
- We value the contribution our staff make to delivering customer focused services, and leaders, managers and staff demonstrate these behaviours.
Information & Access:
- We take reasonable steps to make sure our customers have received and understood the information we provide.
- We can demonstrate that information we provide to our customers is accurate and complete, and that when this is not the case we advise customers when they will receive the information they requested.
- We have made arrangements with other providers and partners to offer and supply co-ordinated services, and these arrangements have demonstrable benefits for our customers.
- We interact within wider communities and we can demonstrate the ways in which we support those communities.
Delivery:
- We can demonstrate that we deliver the service we promised to individual customers and that outcomes are positive for the majority of our customers.
We will deploy a new integrated booking system early in 2026. This will be used to set further stretching targets around timeliness and quality.
You can read the full SIS CSE Report 2025
This is the 15th continuous year of our Customer Service Excellence (CSE) journey. You can see how far we have come from this Chart:
We are deeply proud of our collective achievement in delivering language services at the heart of our communities.
Congratulations to everyone involved in SIS who works so hard to deliver our services!
We welcome your feedback:
https://sussexinterpreting.org.uk/feedback/
https://sussexinterpreting.org.uk/complaints-form/
Vikki Gimson – Quality Assurance Manager vikki@sussexinterpreting.org.uk
Arran Evans – SIS Director arran@sussexinterpreting.org.uk
