Long regarded as a work in progress, local government's customer service standards, particularly in contact centres, are starting to eclipse those of the private sector.

Local authorities are becoming the focal point for a range of services: advice on your children's next school, advice on the best local recycling centre and 24/7 advice on local emergencies, such as flooding. Councils' call centres are handling calls on 300 to 400 different services every day, against the expectations of critics who once regarded them as driving through communications technologies before services were ready.

If our experience is anything to go by, councils across Britain are revamping their services and, critically, the way they handle local people's needs.

Councils have had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps in the online age. People can arrange holidays, buy Christmas presents and book their car in for a service online. But we were painfully aware that many council services were provided in isolation and many weren't online. Too often, local authorities required people to come into offices to fill in time-consuming paper forms with the same details over and over again.

Year by year, departmental services are being joined up and handled by dedicated customer contact centres that direct callers to the relevant expert, a telephone-based payment service or online forms as needed. This task is by no means finished, but councils are building services “around the citizen”, rather than maintaining outdated processes that leave customers somewhere in the middle. Local authorities re-examined their services at every level, brainstormed improvements and refashioned processes combining entrepreneurial flair with the expertise of departmental staff.

Despite getting 500,000 calls, 24,000 e-mails and 20,000 face-to-face visits every year, we are achieving 80 per cent local customer satisfaction ratings. When such figures are projected across the UK's 466 local authorities, the ability to understand customer needs and handle them personably and sympathetically is becoming a reality. Can utilities and rail companies match this performance?

Credit must go also to intelligent communication tools that councils are using. Customer relationship management (CRM) software enables calls to be routed to the staff with expert knowledge and qualifications. When West Berkshire suffered serious flooding last year, our authority was directing 400 calls an hour to trained staff. As the emergency intensified, we patched in extra staff by telephone, to reassure and inform. Using these tools, we are making better use of service teams' accrued knowledge to resolve inquiries quickly and efficiently.

Have banks genuinely met customers' needs as savers rushed online to check their account savings in recent months?

Councils are also using CRM tools to motivate and train staff. Team members have asked for and secured further qualifications and moved to work in the departments they originally took calls for. To many, call centre workers are battery hens, unable to progress. We see them as professionals, willing to learn.

— Sean Anderson is head of customer service for West Berkshire Council

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