May 27, 2010
My thanks to Nic Streatfeild, founder of rol Ltd the developers of GovMetric, for an email about his latest posting on his newish blog. Perhaps if I’d kept up with his Tweets I might have realised without the prompt!
GovMetric had the sense to realise that the Internet is not the only channel and so record feedback across the available ones, e.g. web, face-to-face and telephone.
When I started my research Nic was kind enough to meet up in Leicester for a chat about it and even offered access to anonymised data, which in the end I didn’t take up, but they’ve now taken a different approach and created the UK Councils Monthly Buzz Index out of their CouncilMonitor tool! So as well as reporting back citizen feedback via GovMetric they’re also trawling social media for feedback on councils. This seems a little like Professor Ann Macintosh’s IMPACT development work for the EU reported earlier, but focused on specific councils.
This experiment may or may not succeed but if nothing else will reveal some interesting trends across the GovMetric users. Unfortunately, for Nic and GovMetric my council and most of the others in North Yorkshire have signed up with a competitor, CMetrix. It’s nothing personal, just Yorkshire folk being canny with their money. What also may be interesting is when we can compare data across five districts and a county council.
My list of all the similar systems to GovMetric and CMetrix is still available at Company table V8.
Leave a Comment » | 
Metrics, Social media, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement | Tagged: govmetric, rol, CMetrix, IMPACT, Nic Streatfeild, Ann Macintosh | 
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Posted by greatemancipator
January 12, 2010
The Socitm Customer Access Improvement Service has published its latest (December 2009) report, which is Issue 3. It has received a great detail of reportage for its emphasis on poorly performing council web sites. I’m not sure that quite so much can be read from the cumulative data, and a bit like National Indicator 14 “avoidable contact” believe these analyses need to take place at a more granular level and thing some of the assumptions are very subjective!
I also have a concern that a document from Socitm is making statements like the one on page 3 “The country cannot afford the current scale of the public sector.” This is a broad brush attack on all government, so includes local authorities and health trusts. This is not a decision for an IT managers organization, it’s one for the electorate since some countries, as we know, have a much higher scale of expenditure. What really matters is the quality being delivered for that expenditure, if its too high a quality or too low, the public have to decide. If too much is being spent they have to decide what services are no longer required, or whether services they can do without are being delivered. Ultimately this is the value of applications such as that used by GovMetric or the others named on my list (see below) – they give the public an opportunity to comment on the value of services delivered.
According to the report there are now 56 councils providing GovMetric data but of these only one is acknowledged to be recording data across the three major channels in one directorate or service only, which is not ideally what we should be achieving if we are to understand channel shift or manage channels at all.
Big things continue to be made about South Tyneside’s apparent channel shift around waste management, which they achieved by developing their web site as a result of feedback through the service, I would argue that all channels need to be improved and this is an end-to-end reform of services, since channels are only the presentation layer. We have a lot more experience with the face-to-face and telephone channels and have obviously some experience at delivering them, but the web is the new kid on the block, it can’t at the moment be interactive in the sense of the Turing machine.
I believe getting feedback from citizens is the way forward but I have doubts about making too much of it from the higher level generalizations that Socitm makes and I must say that the one promoted by Socitm is not the only solution – have a look at the list – Company table V8.
UPDATE - I’ve been asked by Alex Chapman of GovMetric to update on a few possible inaccuracies between my reading of the Socitm CAIS report and the state of play with GovMetric, which I am posting below -
- “There are currently 59 authorities signed up to GovMetric with a further 9 housing associations; so, there are just under 70 users in total
- More importantly, almost all of these are using GovMetric in a multi-channel approach measuring customer feedback and performance across at least 3 channels (F2F, phone and web) and across typically 8 services
- An increasing number are also linking this feedback data to E&D and customer segmentation groups as well to increase their insight about what customers needs are, their experiences and their channel preferences.
I agree with you whole heartedly that, “if we are to understand channel shift or manage channels at all”, we do need to go beyond one service or even one channel; this is not the case with GovMetric, neither in concept nor in practice. From a GovMetric perspective, customer feedback is not the only thing that matters, but being able to understand service demand by service, by channel, as well.”
1 Comment | Metrics, NI 14, NI14, Systems thinking, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: CAIS, govmetric, NI14, Socitm | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
August 9, 2009
What’s been happening in NI14 land?
I’d been looking at and considering the replies to this year’s survey but having only had 31 responses I wasn’t rushing to do the data analysis. However, Public Sector Forums did another encouraging post about the survey and despite it having little effect I started examining the data.
It’s a bit of a pain for those getting the RSS feed but rather than spend ages transfering a MS Word document into WordPress with the inevitable cutting and hacking at the HTML I decided to cheat and put it as a PDF!
I had a couple of surprises from the results but you’ll just have to look at the Great Emancipator Survey 2009 Interim Report…
For greater comparison, it may help looking at last years at the same time?
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, NI 14, NI14, Systems thinking, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: govmetric, Public Sector Forums, Socitm | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
June 7, 2009
It was an interesting week (w/c 1 June 2009). On Wednesday morning I met up with Vicky Sargent of Socitm who was presenting the latest consolidated feedback from the GovMetric/Socitm Customer Access Improvement Service. Vicky and I are old acquaintances and so had time before and afterwards to compare notes, and I am pleased to say CAIS supports what I have been saying on this blog that we (government or any service provider) need to collect and compare feedback across all channels and use it to improve services across them all in a coordinated manner.
On Thursday morning I was travelling around the beautiful northern reaches of the very rural district that I work in, checking on polling stations. The fact that at one I managed to get a mobile signal by standing in the middle of the village green next to the tall steel maypole might indicate the limited coverage. If an emergency had occurred it would have meant looking for one of the BT K6 phoneboxes that are still around these ‘chocolate box’ villages! So, what about datacomms in these areas? What about modernising elections in these rural village and church hall ballot stations, many of which don’t have disabled access let alone Internet?
Friday saw me at the Yorkshire International Business Convention discussing broadband services in between listening to excellent presentations from John Cleese, Dave Stewart, Tim Sanders, Matt Pritchett, Tim Smit and Tracy Edwards about creativity, innovation and inspiration. One message was to be positive and stay that way.
The deep thoughts left me thinking about what should change, what could change, and how we change it.
My current conclusion is to use the above described multi-channel feedback and remodel services around it. When technology permits other things will be facilitated.
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: CAIS, govmetric, Socitm, Yorkshire International Business Convention | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
May 25, 2009
I’ve mentioned Professor Bob Johnston before but it appears he’s also a favourite of the Institute of Customer Service. Based upon his research they’ve published some brief guidance upon how to best manage them. They’ve also published various reports commissioned by them from researchers such as Bob.
There are some words of wisdom such as:
“A complaint is a gift and you should consider yourself lucky that a customer is prepared to give up valuable time to help you improve your organisation.”
“One can learn so much about problems with internal processes, training, specific employees/managers, and product – free”
“Do you have a continuous culture? Do you check customer (and employee) satisfaction regularly?”
There’s also a comment here from Vicky Sargent who does much work on the web metrics side of Socitm - she’s seen councils where monitoring feedback makes a difference to their services!
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, customer satisfaction, engagement | Tagged: Bob Johnston, govmetric, Institute of Customer Service, Socitm, Vicky Sargent | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
December 3, 2008
A recent survey from supplier Rostrvm included the addendum that:
“Other problems identified by the contact centres include the ambiguity of what is required (19%), the necessity of training staff to comply (11%) and preparing the back office and service support systems to handle the extra data (10%). A further 8% would struggle due to a lack of resources and time constraints. Just 4% of the local authorities surveyed did not perceive any problems preventing them from meeting the target. “
I was actually surprised at the large numbers doing anything, although at the recent Tower NI14 event I was the only one who admitted their authority wasn’t being particularly active, I suspect I was the only one stupid enough to do so in front of the Audit Commission and Government Office!
The problem demonstrated by the survey is that in its true conception the indicator is not just for call centres and should cover all citizen contact be that face-to-face, email or web, so it needs to be dealt with as a CORPORATE issue! I wonder how many can truly say that?
The fact that ‘avoidable contact’ or whatever is not just for call centres is proven by The ‘Half-yearly review and results summary’ of the Socitm/Govmetric Customer Access Improvement Service where on page 8 was the revelation that not all channels are equal that whilst telephony was favoured for many there was an clear lead on the web for adult services and that in satisfaction terms the web was less satisfactory across all the services listed! This is a clear vote for Citizen Engagement Exchange to dig into the reasons why, especially when most of those using the telephone for all services were satisfied. I’m afraid the publication is for users and Socitm Insight subscribers so I can’t link to it here, but it just proves what those of us looking at the breadth of channels will have realised! It also showed just how great the web channel usage was compared with the others…despite lack of satisfaction.
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, NI14, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement | Tagged: citizen engagement exchange, govmetric, NI14, rostrvm, Socitm | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
November 19, 2008
2 Comments | Metrics, NI14, customer satisfaction | Tagged: counciltracker, govmetric, iizuka, mavisnet, NI14, opalresponse, Opinion-8, rostrvm, singularity | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
October 26, 2008
I had been in touch with Brendan McCarron of the CIPFA Performance Improvement Network in the past and it had been he that had pointed me to the paper on the Scottish Accounts Commission on gap analysis that I’ve mentioned before:
He has been working with Simon Speller, councillor and academic (who was referenced in the aforementioned report) on customer satisfaction in a series of works for the CIPFA Performance Improvement Network – Improving Customer Satisfaction.
On the 9th October I gave a short presentation in Preston on an academic view of customer satisfaction for the ESD-Toolkit group looking at Customer Insight which is related to the one on profiling. This also provided some feedback to my research – ESD-Toolkit – Customer profiling & satisfaction
On November 11th I am presenting another academic view at the EiP conference in London, the EiP Group is looking at Customer Insight, Citizen Engagement and Change In Local Government
How many more networks are there? I’ve also been involved with Socitm‘s discussions around metrics and these overlap with the ESD-Toolkit since both employ GovMetric, a couple of whose staff I had conversations with at the outset of my research.
Are we all talking to each other folks or are you relying upon me talking to you?
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, transformational change | Tagged: govmetric, ESD-Toolkit, CIPFA, Socitm, EiP, PIN | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
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 » | Metrics, NI14, customer satisfaction, e-government | Tagged: govmetric, IDeA, NI14, Opinion-8 | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
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…
Leave a Comment » | Metrics, NI14, customer satisfaction, e-government | Tagged: govmetric, Paul Canning, PSWMG, Socitm, U.S.G.S.A., Yardstick | Permalink
Posted by greatemancipator
