I have to agree that there are problems with taking private sector experience in full and dumping it onto the public sector just as I have argued elsewhere that taking the American model and plastering it over the UK public sector won’t work, as coincidentally probably neither will the Canadian, without some tuning. However the points I think Merholz are making are around human nature, which is largely universal.

I also agree with the comments about “customer”; within this blog and the 30,000 words of dissertation I have done I argue strongly against its use. The citizen needs to be treated as such and consumerising them depletes many associated qualities, whether the citizen likes it or not!

You should also find I am trying to deal with “expectations”, but one of the difficulties that only those who have worked with or in both realise is the breadth of services or possible interactions that local government provide, and as you say a bad experience in one area may end up labelling the many other innocent services. The private sector tends to have a much narrower shop window, where a bad experience at C***t might actually encourage a visit to C****s. All government can do is anchor those expectations for the citizen’s benefit, financially and in terms of quality.

The joy of working in the public sector is the breadth of individual services you can get involved with, its also the factor that makes it harder to re-engineer to citizen comprehension.

I think that it’s difficult for the public sector to use the work of folk like Merholz succesfully. Essentially this is because the public sector, especially Local Government has a much more difficult job than private sector enterprises because of the multiple relationships that a local authority (say) has with the people it serves.

Any one “customer” (a dangerous term because it generalises the individual you are seeking to serve and defines them in terms of the relationship you want, not necessarily the one they want) is perhaps a service user, a tax payer, a user of other services, a benefit claimant and so on. For each of these roles the “customer” has a set of Merholz style experience drivers which can be contradictory (“I expect a better service but I want to pay less tax,” is perhaps the classic) which make it difficult to design services that will respond to all these drivers. Equally “Expectation” is driven by both their engagement with the public sector and with the private sector and unfortunately for the public sector public expectations go to the highest levels of each.

This isn’t a council of despair, only a recognition that public services have an extra dimension that few private sector enterprises have to contend with.

When it come to me interacting with my bank, it’s relatively straight forward (plus of course I know what it is they do and what they don’t do). Another problem that the public sector has is that the public isn’t always clear about the scope of services – their pre-conceptions about what public sector services do (or should do) is a heavily conditioning factor in setting their expectations, and the setting of these expectations is only parlty under the control of the individual public agency.