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!

So whilst we have two new documents:

How to measure customer satisfaction: A toolkit for improving the customer experience in public services

Promoting Customer Satisfaction: Guidance on improving the customer experience in Public Services

The Canadians produced:

Client Satisfaction Surveying: Common Measurements Tool

Client Satisfaction Surveying: A Managers Guide

In the late 1990′s and the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service (ICCS), which has taken over the Citizen-Centred Service Network from the Canadian Centre for Management Development  has a library of publications for download or purchase.  All the documents mentioned above are probably best sourced by ‘googling’ for them but in the case of the Canadian ones it is perhaps due to their age, the ICCS having a number of other documents available.

I must admit that Cabinet Office guidance does refer critically  to the Canadian CMT and states that Suffolk Customer Service Direct is using it, however in the model I am suggesting, granularity is kept to a minimum and equates to the CMT Outcome, since I am looking for a straightforward view across all channels. 

C’est la vie?