UK Government Debate Customer Care

Press Release: BSA: Customer Care to the Fore at Conference Meeting.

A fringe meeting at the United Kingdom Labour Party Spring Conference was the setting for a lively debate on the crucial importance of good customer care skills to the delivery of public services.

The meeting was hosted jointly by BSA, the representative body for outsourced service contractors, and PCS, the union which represents civil and public servants in central government. It focused on the joint project launched by the two organisations in January 2006 to improve customer care skills in the public sector.

Speakers at the meeting, alongside BSA Director-General Norman Rose and PCS Senior National Officer Graham Steel, included the TUC’s Liz Smith who hailed the project as ‘a very exciting development.’

Graham Steel explained that the main objective was to prepare staff for an increasingly competitive world: ‘Our long-term aim is to develop a Public Sector Skills Standard which is flexible enough to suit business needs but also clear enough to offer a guaranteed level of training opportunity on all Government contracts. It will set basic parameters against which existing training provision can be benchmarked and will offer a menu of independently accredited training opportunities.

‘The first phase of the project focuses on customer care skills, reflecting feedback from our researches which identifies this as one of the most important needs of the sector.’

Norman Rose reinforced the point: ‘Service delivery is all about people – those who deliver and those who receive. For this reason, good customer care skills are at the heart of all we do and we in BSA are proud to be part of this ground-breaking collaboration between the trades unions and employers to raise skills levels in this area.’

Source: Press Release