Customer Service Excellence

Customer Service Excellence is a government-backed industry standard focusing on service delivery, timeliness, information, professionalism and staff attitude. It emphasises customer insight (knowledge about the people who use our services), understanding the user experience and robust measurement of service satisfaction.

We were assessed against 57 different elements of the standard. The assessments involved providing evidence of how we meet the standard, together with assessors interviewing our staff, service users and stakeholders.

The Customer Service Excellence standard means you can expect to receive a high standard of service from us, whatever the outcome or decision. We will make sure we understand your circumstances and needs. We will explain our processes to you and what you can expect from us at every stage of our work - and we will always treat you with respect and courtesy. You can read more about our commitment to you in our service user standards.

Our accreditation

  • In March 2022 we achieved compliance in 45 elements and increased our ‘compliance plus’ ratings to ten elements. 
  • In March 2021 we achieved compliance in 47 elements and increased our ‘compliance plus’ ratings by excelling in eight elements. We were also proud to win awards for ‘Using standards to support change’ and ‘Customer Service Excellence - building a customer focused organisation’.
  • In March 2020 we achieved compliance in 48 of the 57 elements and excelled with a ‘compliance plus’ rating in three elements.
graphic showing our progress each year with customer service excellence accreditation

Compliance Plus means we are exceeding the standard. Compliance is that we are to the required standard and Partial compliance means we are not quite to the standard but are demonstrating we are striving to get there. It should be noted that any ‘Not compliant’ areas would result in the IOPC not achieving the Customer Service Excellence® standard.

March 2022 achievements

Customer Service Excellence Report 2022

We were proud to win awards for ‘Using standards to support change’ and ‘Maintaining a customer focused organisation’. These were awarded by Assessment Services Ltd, one of the awarding bodies of the certification, following a competitive process. Customer Service Excellence Report 2022