Article by Paul Goffin, Director of Estates Services, University of Oxford

When I arrived as the new Director of the University of Oxford’s Estates Services department in 2012, a key part of my brief was improving the service we gave our customers. My first move was to spend time visiting them to learn their views. What I heard made it clear that there was room for improvement.

This is not to imply that we were doing bad work. But it is fair to say that the relationship between us and academic departments was closer to one between landlord and tenant than one between service provider and customer. There was a real opportunity for Estates Services to improve its core mission by putting more emphasis on consulting with customers to find out their needs.

Seeking Customer Service Excellence (CSE) accreditation offered a way to do this. The old Estates Directorate had also recently been merged with the University Land Agent, to create the Estates Services department I lead today. We needed to break down the silos between teams and unify the whole organisation, and CSE had the potential to help.

I decided our goal would be to achieve accreditation for the whole department, fully aware that this would be a serious challenge. In some cases even starting to think of the other parts of the University we work for as our customers was a major shift in attitudes. To help set this momentous change in departmental culture in motion, we revised our core values based on research into customer priorities and consultation with other parts of the University. The six new values – continuous improvement; consultation; openness, transparency and clarity; timeliness; fair and equal treatment and listening – now underlie everything we do.

What does this mean in practice? One example is that consulting those we work for about how satisfied they are with our services is now standard practice, and that what we learn in these surveys feeds into our constant efforts to improve those services. Another is the regular staff training sessions we organise to make sure staff have a firm grasp of the principles of customer service, and our regular monitoring programme for key measures of satisfaction.

The process has been challenging as well as rewarding. One difficulty we faced from the beginning was the lack of existing models of how to gain CSE accreditation as an estates department. Certain services within other such departments had gained accreditation, but we were the first to seek it as a whole. This was unknown territory, not just for us but also for our assessor. For much of the journey, we had to find our own way.

After carrying out a pre-assessment to establish exactly where we were starting from, we made arrangements for our first assessment, covering our Facilities Management team.  It turned out to be a successful exercise, although it also highlighted numerous areas that we could, and did, improve for future assessments.

Since then, teams all over the department have gained accreditation in turn, culminating early this year when the last one – Asset and Space Management – received the news that its assessment had been successful. From now on there will be a rolling process of re-accreditation, but compared to the work we have already done this should be manageable.

Do I recommend undergoing CSE accreditation to other estates departments in a similar position to ours? Without question. There have been difficulties along the way, and at times the journey has demanded heroic efforts from people all over the department. We are still seeking the right balance in some areas – for example, how to get the information we need without bothering our customers with excessive requests for feedback.

But the benefits far outweigh the costs. The idea that the people and departments we work for are our customers, and that we should be doing everything we can to give them a good service, is now ingrained in the culture of Estates Services. For a department like ours, this can only be a good thing.

Lessons learned along the way                                    

-          The foundation of CSE accreditation is understanding exactly who your customers are and what they want.

-          Gaining accreditation for each team within the department rather than for the department as a whole is slower and takes more work, but leads to a much more robust result. Each team has to gain accreditation on its own merits; there is no question of focusing only on the department’s most prominent services and neglecting other areas.

-          A successful assessment depends on many, many pieces of information. Creating document templates that clearly set out exactly what is needed will make this information much easier to gather, reducing the burden on those involved.

-          A strong relationship with your CSE assessor is vital, so do everything you can to make his or her life easier. The more they can focus on how well you are serving customers, rather than trying to understand the details of the services you provide, the better.

-          Benchmarking your performance is a particular challenge, and one we have not yet fully solved. Success is all about finding a comparable organisation to work with. You should not assume that this will necessarily be another university. Many might think the natural point of comparison for Oxford would be Cambridge – but in reality the two estates work very differently. Rather than searching only for comparable universities, look for organisations offering comparable services to yours. For example, our Security Services team carries out alarm monitoring, and so do police forces all over the UK, so both can potentially benefit from sharing benchmarking information.

-          Your assessor can tell you which parts of the CSE standard you are not currently complying with, but cannot formally tell you what you need to do to change this. By paying close attention during informal conversations, though, you will often be able to pick up useful hints on what is needed.

-          Internal competition between teams to get the best result in their assessments is a powerful way of improving performance – encourage it if you can!