What Google reviewers say about Sheffield Council as it ranks lowest in Yorkshire
Many reviewers mention difficulty getting through to customer services, spending a long time on hold, being cut off and not being helped
Sheffield City Council has the lowest Google rating of any Yorkshire council, with one star reviews criticising driving fines and difficulty getting through to the council on the phone.
Researchers looked at Google Maps listings for each of the UK's 382 councils headquarters or main customer service centre on October 8.
Councils needed at least 100 reviews to be ranked, which cut the comparisons down to 108 councils across the UK.
Sheffield City Council averages 1.84 stars from 222 reviews, with 168 of them giving one star.
Many of the reviews mention difficulty getting through to customer services, spending a long time on hold, being cut off and not being helped when they do get through, raising concerns about how the council deals with public enquiries.
Other common issues raised by reviewers surround fines from Sheffield's clean air zone, bus gates and car parks, and issues from potholes, damp and mould in homes, council tax and home repairs.
City of Doncaster Council is Yorkshire's highest rated with 2.37 stars from 195 reviews.
Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council scores 1.86, Leeds City Council and City of York Council 1.90 each, and Bradford Council had 2.00 stars.
Oliver Weston, founder of seobacklinks.com, who made the comparisons said: "People don't leave their council a Google review when the bins are collected on time. They leave one after an hour on hold, which is why these scores are so low and why the same complaint keeps coming up.
"What surprised us is how little councils do about it. The star rating sits right beside the phone number when you search for your council on Google, and the 10 lowest-rated councils replied to one of their 600 most recent reviews. A short public reply saying who to contact would cost a council nothing."
The council has not responded to any of its Google reviews.
Councillor Zahira Naz, Deputy Leader of Sheffield City Council and Customer Lead in Strategy and Resource Policy Committee, said: “We’re listening to what customers are telling us and making practical improvements.
"This month we launched five new customer standards, setting out the ‘brilliant basics’ people should expect from every council service: making it easy to contact us, responding with care and understanding, keeping things clear and simple, being reliable and delivering on time, and listening and improving.
“These standards are about changing the everyday experience of dealing with the council.
"We’re using them to set clearer expectations for services, improve response times and communications, make more services easier to access digitally, and use complaints and customer insight to tackle recurring issues.
"It means turning the standards into practical changes that customers can see and feel.
“We encourage customers to use our formal feedback and complaints channels when something goes wrong, so we can investigate, respond and put things right.
"We’re also building Google review analysis and responses into our future customer insight work, so that feedback helps us keep improving.”