Customer Service Excellence Standard

According to the owners of the Customer Service Excellence Standard, the Cabinet Office, the Government wants services for all that are efficient, effective, excellent, equitable and empowering, with the citizen always and everywhere at the heart of service provision.

With this in mind, the Standard was developed to provide a practical tool for driving customer-focused change within an organisation. The foundation of this tool is the standard which is designed to allow organisations to self-assess their capability in relation to customer focused service delivery, identifying areas and methods for improvement.

Customer Service Excellence Standard and the EFQM Excellence Model

The Standard is, by its very nature, focused on customer service. While it provides a useful means for addressing this, it does not help with the wider aspects of an organisation's operations.

It corresponds with the EFQM Excellence Model's nine criteria as follows:

Leadership
Strategy
People
Partnerships and resources
Processes, products and services
Customer results
People results
Society results
Key results

	= addresses many of the Criterion guidance points
	= addresses some of the Criterion guidance points
	= addresses few of the Criterion guidance points

At the BQF, we consider customer service to be vitally important, however this on its own will not improve an organisation's performance if other key areas are neglected. The Model treats customers and people as part of the bigger picture, and enables an organisation to understand how they fit into it.

More information and guidance

We can support you and your organisation's use of the Standard alongside the Model with a range of products and services:

Workshops

• Customer Delight
  This explores the importance of deeply understanding your customers' needs and how to align your organisation to deliver an excellent customer experience. 

• Using the EFQM Excellence Model and Standards together
  This gives an understanding of how standards fit together with the Model and can be used to an organisation's best advantage.

• How to use the EFQM Excellence Model
  An introduction to the Model which demonstrates practical ways to take the next steps on a journey to excellence.

In-house workshops and bespoke training courses are also available. Please call us on 020 7654 5000 or contact us to discuss your requirements.

Networking Groups

• Customer Experience Networking Group
  This group enables people to meet, share and learn from each other. It focuses on the customer-related issues that organisations face such as employee engagement, customer loyalty and advocacy, and customer intimacy, and how use of appropriate planning, prioritisation, improvement and review techniques can address them.
• EFQM Excellence Model User Group
  The purpose of this group is to help anybody already involved in using the Model or interested in using it, to achieve optimum results by learning from the experiences of others.

Case studies

Find out more about other organisations' approach to delivering customer satisfaction with our case studies.