SS14 66 - Provision of Customer Satisfaction Surveys at Household Waste Recycling Centres for Kent County Council

Kent County Council (the Authority) is the largest local authority in England covering an area of 3,500 square kilometres. It has an annual expenditure of over 1bn on goods and services and a population of 1.3m. The Authority provides a wide range of personal and strategic services on behalf of its residents, operating in partnership with 12 district councils and 289 parish/town councils.

Waste Management (WM) currently has 18 Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRCs) across the County with total customer throughput each week equating to around 69,000 visits. The operation of most of the HWRCs is contracted out to several different waste management companies. WM is committed to providing a high level of service to its customers and recognises that one of the key ways of achieving this is through obtaining customer feedback.

The Authority is seeking a Provider to undertake approximately 6,840 customer satisfaction surveys per annum, at two seasonal sample points (with 3,420 undertaken in April and 3,420 undertaken in October) across its network of HWRCs.

The Authority wishes to understand the customer experience at facilities and measure how satisfied customers are with the service they receive. One of the key requirements of the waste management companies operating the HWRCs is delivering good customer service and performance targets have been put in place for HWRC providers to achieve.

There are four main objectives for undertaking customer satisfaction surveys:

Customer service

To monitor the level of customer service delivered by HWRC staff To monitor cleanliness levels and site conditions To monitor queuing (entry) times at HWRCs

Customer Behaviours

To gauge how frequently participants utilise a HWRC.

To understand what barriers customers experience using a HWRC.

To gauge customers understanding of HWRC policies and procedures.

To see where customers are travelling from.

Contract Management

To aid in the monitoring of the performance of the Authoritys HWRC providers in relation to contract specifications.

To set future performance targets.

Suggested improvements

To understand views on what could be improved or included in service delivery.

It is the intention of the Authority to provide the successful Provider with a pre-set questionnaire. However, the Authority would seek to work with this organisation to develop this questionnaire taking into account their knowledge of the business and expertise within this sector.

The initial Contract term is three years (36 months) with an option to extend (exercised at the discretion of the Authority and by mutual consent) for a further two years (24 months) resulting in a potential total Contract term of 5 years (60 months), unless terminated in accordance with the Conditions of Contract on the Kent Business Portal. The Contract is anticipated to commence from 16th March 2015, with the first programme of survey fieldwork to begin in April 2015.

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