Thanks to residents for telling Customer Services Manager Mark Peet your views at our Ward Focus Meeting. He has investigated your issues and reports back below on actions taken.
As promised I have a further update on improvements to the Residents and Visitors Parking Permit service.
In July I advised that I would be looking at further ways to improve our online service and document validation service for residents, in particular around the Headington area, who are unable to upload documents as part of the application process.
I am pleased to inform you I have made changes to reflect the need to improve both of these areas.
- Online Payments – As part of the online application process for Resident and Visitor Permits, residents in Controlled Parking Zones can now complete the full application online including paying for their permits. There is now a secure, safe and PCI compliant way to pay for residents when applying. This service was made available from Monday 8thAugust and we have had over 100 applicants in less than a week choosing to apply and pay using this service.
- Document Validation – On the 8thand 9th of September our team in Headington Library will be training in Document Validation which will enable them to validate parking documentation. This service will then be available in Headington Library from week commencing 12th September. This means customers will be able to validate the documents we need as part of the application processes without needing to send them into us. We will simply check the documents and hand them back to the resident once we have confirmed they are correct.
It’s good to see positive changes being made by the County Council and an officer keen to come out to public meetings to listen to and act upon our residents’ concerns.
That’s certainly good news. The bad news is that there is a back-log issuing permits which are taking (in my experience) 12 days to arrive. Telephoning to enquire entails many minutes of patience and some luck.
When the Parking Shop existed, the whole process was completed on the spot and you came away with your permit/s.
Hello Neil, if there is a particular problem you know of currently please let us know and we’ll chase it. We’ve been advised the current turnaround time is 3 days. R
The person I finally got through to yesterday just said there was a backlog and didn’t seem surprised when I said it was 11 days since my application. To his credit, the permits (visitor) arrived 24 hours later. I think I may have jumped the queue by hanging on the phone. I got the impression that the same people were dealing with the online applications and having to deal with telephone calls. Recorded message on phone spoke of “high volume of calls” which made me suspect that I wasn’t alone in trying to get through!
Thanks for that feedback. We may be getting reports from the manager that are different from what our residents are hearing from front line staff. We’ll ask why that’s happening.
Roz and I have visited the County Council’s back office team who deal with enquiries. You’re right – they are multi-skilled in that they take turns to answer phones and to deal with online enquiries. And those enquiries aren’t just for parking issues, they’re for all sorts of things. They do keep a watch on the board to check time taken to pick up phone enquiries and there are supervisors to whom staff can take more complex issues for advice. They also refer some issues to other dedicated teams.