Yardsticking!

June 28, 2008

My concerns about benchmarking, targets and related matters, whilst not universal appears to have some adherants! During the last week have discussed it amongst colleagues at Socitm (Yorkshire & Humber) and with Paul Canning and Public Sector Web Managers Group.

I also discoved a paper from the U.S. General Services Administration – Improving Citizen Customer Service V 1.0, which also supports my theory and also uses the term ‘yardstick’ which I think is a much better term when dealing with purely internal metrics as opposed to (possible) target setting. If you don’t want to read it all, just focus on chapters 5 and 6.

Four of the eight guidelines in the conclusions are:

“A quantitative “value” for citizen satisfaction can be used as a yardstick for trends. This value can be defined in various ways. Agencies can track the percentage of citizens who expressed complete satisfaction with their contact or use a scoring system defined internally or by a third party.

Qualitative satisfaction questions and information will help agencies analyze citizens’ expectations and areas in which they are not meeting those expectations.

Quantitative (and to some extent qualitative) satisfaction data should be used to examine the correlation between the performance metrics and benchmarks used in this document and citizen satisfaction. For example, if improving average handle times at an agency is not resulting in an increase in satisfaction scores, the agency’s time and effort is better spent elsewhere in the service environment.

Surveys can be conducted at the end of a contact or within a reasonable timeframe after
the interaction.”

and also states:

“Performance metrics described in this document are only effective if they are captured, reported and analyzed in a timely manner and reach the right decision maker. Also, metrics should be used not in isolation but in the context of a strategy and methodology.”

Of course I’m not arguing to import this wholeheartedly from the USA, if one reads the document it is still rather onerous for a small organisation but data integration and analyis or Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) can be done – if only GovMetric weren’t so expensive ! It’d blow NI14 into last year…

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Feedback from Brendan

June 23, 2008

I let Brendan McCarron at the IPF know what I’d said and here’s the response -

“I wonder if Brendan was trying to catch out plagiarists? – you bet. But, 7/10 for using the sixsigma forum as a reference, anyone, even me, could contribute to that. Follow up the gaps model of PZB and its application in Local government at the Scottish Accounts Commission here(http://www.audit-scotland.gov.uk/utilities/search_report.php?id=415) from 1999, I also have some references where it is used in rural Turkish local government where assurance in the sense of “I want to deal with the head man” outweighs everything.”

Which was great! Audit Scotland have produced some excellent and forward thinking papers over the years so I look forward to digesting that. As to rural Turkey, it sounds no different from here in rural Yorkshire!

From the debate on http://communities.idea.gov.uk about Customer Insight, Mary Telow fed back that:

“I am not convinced that the ‘Engage’ notion of ‘deep truth’ translates all that well into managing services for customer insight and I think a bit more clear thinking is required to unpick the difference between what we need in order to run a good comms campaign and what we really need to know about customers to manage services effectively in the light of what we know. For the latter we need to work on organisational cultures and get customer understanding embedded in performance management systems and leadership development programmes – and we can’t do this if we don’t have lots of information about the customer experience. I’d like us to focus on (a) understanding the specifics of experience and (b) working on how the data flows around organisations and affects decisions and (c) encouraging everyone in the organisation to understand how their efforts contribute to this fundamental purpose (and incidentally this needs to inform internal customer relationships too, as has already been pointed out. ”

Which made sense to me – I think the deep truth comes from listening to the variety of customers and acting upon it where rational and possible.

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Old whine in new bottles

June 21, 2008

The latest copy of PINpoint, the magazine from the CIPFA Performance Improvement Network, Issue 5, June 2008, includes an interesting compilation from the blogs that are normally in the Network’s mailings but one I must have originally skirted over caught my eye. In theory it should be here but the links didn’t work for me: http://www.cipfanetworks.net/pin/blogs or ww.cipfanetworks.net/pin/blogs/brendan/default.asp?postID=164

Brendan McCarron had picked up on the fact that the Cabinet Office’s Customer Service Excellence (CSE) Standard launched on 10 March 2008 was a re-working (nice, politically correct phrase) of the Treasury Board of Canada’s ‘defunct’ Service Improvment Initiative that had been run by the ICCS, which was based on work done in the City of Victoria that had similarities to the approach of SERVQUAL developed by Parasurama, Zeitelman and Berry but with the descriptions changed to protect them from litigation or payment! I don’t know about the City of Victoria link but there was a guide published by the State – Woodhouse, S.A. et al., 1993. Listening to Customers: An Introduction. Victoria B.C. Service Quality B.C. Secretariat, Government of British Columbia. – which sounds appropriate. The Canadians have also been pretty good at giving credit to Parauraman et al as can be found from the references to the Client Satisfaction Surveying: Common Measurements Tool:

http://www.ccmd-ccg.gc.ca/research/publications/html/tool/tool_10_e.html

As it happens the SERVQUAL work is some I have read so that I know that one of the original papers was actually -

SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality.
Parasuraman, A.; Zeithaml, Valarie A.; Berry, Leonard L. Journal of Retailing. 1988 Spr Vol 64(1) 12-40

The abstract can be found at http://psycnet.apa.org/?fa=main.doiLanding&uid=1989-10632-001

I wonder if Brendan was trying to catch out plagiarists?

Dan Champion had a go at the CSE web site in accessibility terms shortly after the lauch, so much for customer excellence -

Incidentally the ICCS ‘How to’ guide is available at:

http://www.iccs-isac.org/eng/pubs/TBS_How_To_Guide.pdf

My continuing gripe is taking obsolescent (1988 ) American theory and dressing it up to make it look new and then serving it up twenty years later on, particularly when some of it is no longer correct or appropriate.

I’m not saying my proposal about using customer dissatisfaction to assist in driving process improvments is entirely original and here’s another take upon it:

http://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c050627a.asp

But it is a novel development of a parsimonious solution to managing the modern multiple service channels in government, something that SERVQUAL wasn’t – its just a little too complicated!

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Customer what?

June 18, 2008

Helen Begley (Assistant Director, Service Transformation, Cabinet Office) was chairing a debate on the IDeA Communities today (18th June 2008). Having challenged her for a definition she came back with “Insight is defined as a deep ‘truth’ about the customer based on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs or desires, that is relevant to the task or issue and ‘rings bells’ with target people.” This definition is taken from the Government Communication Network’s Engage Programme and is commonly accepted as a useful working definition in most major government publications on this subject. The Insight section on the Engage web site http://engage.comms.gov.uk/ includes more detail on methodology and tools, together with some examples of where deep psychological truths derived from customer insight activity have been applied effectively in campaigns to drive behavioural change.”

Unfortunately I am not a Civil Servant nor on the Civil Service network and so do not have access to this material and so can’t reveal its hidden truths.

She also had this to say “There is much that can be done quickly and simply: the things which matter to people are often far more straightforward and basic than we think. The design of a form, the sequence of a process, a well-timed question can make the difference between success and failure. However the real challenge is cultural. Being customer-centric and using insight is not just about being able to collect data and information. It is about having the capability to turn that information into action and it requires a culture which values insight and is willing to act on it. Too often, customer research is commissioned without first understanding what it is we really need to know and how best to find that out. And too many organisations fail to ensure that the intelligence that they collect on the needs and behaviours of those they’re trying to reach is used effectively and not discarded.”

Which I think is a more verbose way of expressing my view that one collects customer dissatisfaction and acts upon it. Personally, I think customer insight includes much more than her description, it is understanding customer need, which is a step or two further on from collecting feedback and employing that to improve the customer process. I stated in the one-to-many that it was not necessarily the use of the phrase ‘customer insight’ that was confusing but that amongst all the others such as need, satisfaction, engagement etc., along with all the reports that have issued from Cabinet Office in parallel with the drafts of National Indicator 14 (NI14) or ‘avoidable cotact’ coming out from the Communities and Local Government Department, that rather runs contrary.

Since Helen has been so kind to provide a definition of ‘insight’ my next task is to collect definitions of all the others and compare them, to extract the ideal term for what we what from our customers!

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Scorecards, systems, Canada and Australia

June 14, 2008

Researching further following my interest in seeing ‘Systems Thinking’, ‘Balanced Scorecard’ and customer satisfaction all join up I found that the view that scorecard and systems thinking are different paradigms isn’t universal. One example was in an online article called Performance Measurement and the Balanced Scorecard by Dr. Kenneth M. Macur, CPA and Marcia Daszko.

As a former student of Deming I imagine Dazko knows the subject and hence don’t feel too far off the mark. This has also been supported by finding another blogger with a view on web metrics, a  topic that is attracting developing interest in the UK. Clive’s blog is here.

Mary Tetlow supported my argument about Canada being a better model on the IDeA community discussion around the place survey, others like Australia as an e-government model, so lets stop importing ideas from the USA and look at other former colonies, with similar political structures.

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