Customer Contact Benchmarking

Here are some of the questions we are asked most often about Local Government Performance Reviews and the answers to them.

This project is an initiative of Benchmarking PLUS, to help Councils in Australia to achieve continuous improvement. We offer our expertise to gather, analyse and report on comparative performance data to participating Councils. For more information about Benchmarking PLUS and our principals, click here.

Benchmarking PLUS offers this service to Councils as a normal commercial product. We receive no subsidy from any government or funds from any other source. Participating Councils pay a fee for the information.

Wherever possible we work with a small group of subject matter experts from Councils who form a Reference Group for each Review.

The role of the Reference Group is to guide the design of the Review, to work with us to get the data gathering template right, to help develop appropriate KPIs and to generally make sure the project is relevant and useful.

Each Review is designed to be appropriate to both in-house service delivery models and services performed by contractors. If you purchase a service, the Review will help you determine whether you are receiving value for your money.

The actual measures vary according to the subject matter, but they generally include:

•Financial indicators – eg cost per unit of service delivered
•Service indicators – eg percentage of service delivered within service standards
•Internal performance indicators – eg average EFT required to deliver unit of service
•People management - eg absenteeism, turnover, training
•Customer satisfaction - eg rating on a five point scale

Each Review also includes Profile Questions - these are more qualitative questions designed to collect information about practices and processes. For example, we might ask about what computer hardware and software is used to support a particular service, or what the service standards are for a particular service.

We include a set of definitions, including a costing model which shows which levels of overhead are to be included or otherwise in the data you provide to us.

We collect raw data from participants, but what we report is calculated data, such as ratios and percentages, so that such aspects as size or wealth are "normalised".

Data supplied to the project by individual Councils remains the intellectual property of those Councils. The data will be held by Benchmarking PLUS and its web support contractor Australian Survey Research, both of which are bound by strict confidentiality agreements. nobody else will have access to the data, and it will be held on a secure server. It will be used only for the purpose of analysing and reporting on Council performance in the relevant function(s).

The hard copy report of each Review does not allow any participant to be identified. This is achieved by the use of derived data (such as ratios and percentages) rather than raw data, and by the use of identification codes. All derived data, graphical representations of the data and reports generated to disseminate the data are the intellectual property of Benchmarking PLUS.

The online database that is a further benefit of participating in a Review has safeguards to ensure that no search will reveal the identity of a particular Council. If the database is searched and the population is too small to ensure confidentiality, the search will be refused and wider search terms will be required.

We do not publish a public report. The only way to gain access to the information is to contribute your Council's data.

The data gathering process has been designed to be a little intrusive as we can make it. There may be a need for some internal co-ordination to collect data from all the relevant areas of your Council. We ask that you appoint a coordinator for this purpose. The involvement is perhaps one hour per week for this task, but that is the person we will communicate with and he/she should do all the internal communication about the project.

You will be requested to provide some numbers (so that we can compare performance against identified KPIs), but most of this should already be available from your budget and reports you produce for other purposes. The KPIs for each Review are developed in collaboration with the appropriate Reference Group, and availability of the data in large and small Councils is one of the factors considered.

We generally allow at least four weeks for data gathering and entry. If you have all the information to hand, to complete the online questionnaire will probably require about half an hour. You can enter the data in one sitting or go back several times and change it until you are satisfied.

Local government performance reviews

frequently asked questions