Customer Care Programme
User involvement and client feedback is a fundamental part of OSW's programme of service delivery. However, ‘involvement’ does not necessarily mean ‘empowerment’, and our research has found that, traditionally seen as clients or service users, homeless people are rarely able to directly impact on their services.
Homeless people may not hand over cash each time they use a service, but without their attendance and their achievements our funding would dry up. Yet, the homeless sector often fails to reflect this - the power relationship remains unbalanced. Where are our Customer Care strategies? Can we honestly say that our services are led by our customers’ needs?
It is in order to address these issues that we have launched our Homeless Customer Care Programme.
Initial Pilot (2004/05)
In 2004/05, OSW and Cardboard Citizens tested an interactive training programme that used Forum Theatre techniques to enable participants to engage with and fully appreciate the experience of being a homeless customer. The training has been developed with, and is facilitated by, homeless people. It is a dynamic event centred around a performance in which training participants are ‘active’ audience members, and are given the chance to interact with homeless actors.
Through this practical experience, participants learn how to change the focus of their work, to centre on the homeless customer. Feedback from participants has shown how the insight and experience this gives is unrivalled. This experience is combined with theory and support for action planning and change, to provide participants an opportunity to embed customer care into their policy and practice.
New development (2005/07)
Learning from our experience we rolled out the initial pilot as part of a wider customer care project, including the following features:
Homeless Customer Training Events
Building directly on the initial pilot, this training uses Forum Theatre and facilitated discussion to enable participants to discover their own customer care values. On the journey, participants look at what constitutes good customer care, witness homeless peoples’ own experiences of being a customer and get a sense of how things can be changed. During the period October 2005 to April 2006, 88 people from 15 different organisations attended the training. Feedback from the training will directly inform the development of the homeless customer care charter.
In 2006/07 we will run a brief peer-led research programme covering homeless people perceptions of themselves as customers, as well as staff perceptions of homeless people as customers. Findings from this research will also inform the development of the homeless customer care charter.
Homeless Customer Charter
Created by homeless customers, this Charter will establish a baseline of customer expectations. The structure of this will be informed by consumer education, human rights and equalities legislation, but control of content will be with homeless customers. The charter will be piloted with a small group of organisations within our network, those organisations taking part in the pilot will be scored and reviewed by homeless customers against this charter. Unlike many kite marks or quality initiatives, the Homeless Customer Charter will be developed as a visible tool for homeless customers and staff, to personalise for particular projects or organisations.
The Homeless Customer Care Programme is funded under Equal and the European Social Fund.