Customer insight guidance

August 14, 2008

In an exercise that reminds me of that old definition of a consultant*, the IDeA have asked RSe Consulting to produce guidance on customer insight and RSe are asking the advice of the IDeA Community of Practice.

Below I list the questions and my brief responses, the questions do actually focus the mind:

1. How would you define customer insight and how does it differ from other concepts such as customer focus and customer satisfaction?

1. Customer insight is brought about by having sufficient information about customers and their communities. As a practice I prefer citizen engagement, which can only occur successfully (providing satisfaction) when insight is available and focused upon dealing with need.

2. What do you see as the difference between customer insight and citizen insight?

2. The difference is between customer and citizen. All citizens are the customers of government, customers are not necessarily those of government. Customer insight is the type of information provided by Mosiaic and CACI, citizen insight doesn’t exist currently but would be the accumulation of knowledge about particular citizens or groups of them collated from central and local government experience and practice.

3. What are the main challenges faced by Local Authorities looking to develop their customer insight?

3. The main difficulty is that citizen insight is contained within bands of need or service. HMRC’s insight may well be different to that of a district council dealing with the same citizen. Fortunately or otherwise data protection restricts the sharing of much insight.

4. How do you think Councils and local partners should work together to develop their customer insight and what are the challenges in doing so?

4. As with 3, the main challenge is data protection.

5. What are the core customer insight tools that you have seen used well in the sector and by whom?

5. GIS has been used well to map neighbourhoods and their citizens by LA’s such as Sheffield.

6. What tools do you feel are not well understood and used within the sector?

6. The tools are not really ready yet! Geographic Information Systems can be used but need greater layers of data to truly identify citizens within their differing neighbourhoods. How available the data is to be shared is another matter.

7. What do you think should be the key objectives of this guidance?

7. Don’t reinvent the wheel!

8. What are the most important issues that the guidance should cover?

8. Citizenship has obligations as well. Differentiation between consumers and citizens is important when inclusiivity is discussed. Interesting paper on this in ‘Communications – The Next Decade’, published by Ofcom, entitled ‘What citizens need to know. Digital inclusion, information inequality and rights’ by Damian Tambini.

There are of course other papers around the citizen or customer debate but I think its time to call a halt and focus on the needs, satisfaction and engagement of the citizen.

 

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Channel usage and strategy

August 9, 2008

Some comments upon my university Transfer Report by a lecturer with experience in local government suggested that I might not have been clear enough in my reasons for wanting channels measured. So I though it was time to go through it again.

The central government targets for electronic government have pushed central and local government towards service delivery channels facilitated by information technology i.e. self-service web sites and call centres.

Is this a bad thing? It is if you aren’t confident in using these channels e.g. are elderly, have certain disabilities, poor or poorly educated – so the minority communities are potential excluded by the digital divide! Many libraries and other facilities provide access to the Internet and free training is available but many citizens aren’t going to feel able to use them nor are all transactions suitable for all people for delivery in this manner, some prefer an element of discretion or confidence or mediation.

The initial costs of establishing electronic services are expensive so a postcode lottery between large , small, rich and poor local authorities is a potential outcome.

Why do we need to measure channel usage? It is only by measuring usage that we can monitor change in usage, if we further collect feedback from that channel it may be possible to identify the reasons for change, in comparison with the other channels.

Why do we need a channel strategy? If we are to serve citizens we need to identify how, where and when they wish that service to occur. If we are measuring the quantity and quality of that service we can plan the delivery or extension of those channels to suit citizen needs and provider costs. We can budget how different services will be provided for by their usage and potentially assist migration by those who are able to use them to more efficient channels.

With over half of Internet users banking online, there is an increasing opportunity for government to follow this trend but even with those established statistics it is clear that the non-Internet users who have yet to trust online services still need to be catered for, many of which will expect face-to-face service.

My argument is that only by measuring and collating feedback from citizens can one have a strategy and only with a strategy can one hope for successful channel migration or management.

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IDeA NI14 Guidance and GovMetric

August 2, 2008

Public Sector Forums have made a great deal of the fact that the IDeA guidance upon NI14 promoted GovMetric and only GovMetric as a possible solution.

I’ll declare some interests here, I have met wil rol the company that produce GovMetric and over a year ago had an academic discussion with them about the while concept of customer satisfaction and channel migration.The council I work for currently employs the Socitm solution for doing web site evaluation which partialy employs a tool produced by rol, who are working with Socitm to do service benchmarking. I am also a Socitm member, a member of my regional Socitm executive and also on the Local Government Chief Information Officer Council, which Socitm were recruited by central government to create.

I like the concept of GovMetric and haven’t seen anything other than built in CRM tools to match it and of course they don’t all come with the templates for web sites or a complete and designed-for-purpose suite of tools. There is Opinion-8, which I believe doesn’t work quite the same way either.

I’ll agree that it was daft for the IDeA to nominate one tool, I don’t think they could have avoided promoting the ESD-Toolkit, since its their child! However, I have yet to find anything conceptually up to GovMetric. We asked our web developers to build a tool into the web site CSS to collect feedback and they wanted a lot of money, it would probably have contributing to buying GovMetric, which isn’t cheap, and tying up the other channels!

What’s the solution? Horses for courses, I suspect, by the time people get around to trying to collect NI14 data manually they’ll realise what a time waster it is and plump for an electronic tool. What is needed in collecting the data is rigour and an awareness that NI14 is not the answer, the answer is feedback from staff and citizens about the systems we use, be they delivering answers by the web, telephone or face-to-face. We need to collect that feedback and act upon it but at the same time supply the required indicator.

Why do we need to do that? To instil confidence in the public that we mean to change, to transform. We do mean to do this, of course, but we need to demonstrate it! We also need to placate the Minister!

Leave a Comment » | customer satisfaction, e-government, Metrics, NI14 | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator

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