Brixton and Streatham Customer Service Centres

Lambeth's customer centres in Brixton and Streatham revolutionise the way we provide our services to our customers. Both centres offer a range of council services in welcoming environments to give an efficient and stress-free experience. Both centres and the Lambeth call centre have achieved the prestigious Customer Service Excellence standard.

Both centres service up to 1,000 visitors a day with an expected waiting time of around 20 minutes for complex enquiries and much less for brief interactions. This is done by operating a single queuing system rather than separate areas for each service.

In addition, customer services staff have been trained across all council services, including council and housing tax benefit assessment, to ensure true multi-skilling throughout the entire team. Waiting customers can be attended to by the next available officer no matter what their enquiry and can complete multiple transactions in a diverse range of services with just one officer.

In the last two years, both customer centres have hosted the Lambeth Savings and Credit Union to offer advice and financial support to residents on a regular basis. This has been widely promoted and well attended. In addition, to support older people, the centres have hosted roadshows for 'Warm, Well, Wise', which gives advice and practical support on keeping warm in winter.

State-of-the-art support

Both sites use video display walls to promote services and events, give useful information to customers, such as current waiting times and monthly performance figures. Both sites also offer free-to-use internet points and 'hot-phones' that link directly to the Lambeth call-centre, giving customers a choice of multiple channels to resolve their enquiry.

Support is available for customers who are unfamiliar with the internet and other self service channels, with staff on hand to teach them how to report and resolve local authority issues on line.

A new partnership

The Streatham site commenced a new partnership between the local authority and the Primary Care Trust (PCT) to offer GPs, nursing, podiatry, midwifery and alternative therapies in addition to council services. Lambeth staff provide frontline customer support for the whole building, including the PCT elements. This arrangement gives the building a community feel and provides customers with a truly inclusive service. In December 2008, 99 per cent of customers rated this service as either 'excellent' or 'good'.