Not only are there documents from the Cabinet Office about ‘customer satisfaction’ but these seem to coincide nicely with ones being produced by the Local Government Association (LGA) and the National Consumer Council (NCC).
These can be found in the LGA’s document store.
The Improvement & Development Agency (IDeA) and Local Government Association have also commisioned a review of approaches to satisfaction, which is an interesting addition to the literature about fairly complex methods.
This all ties in with an article by David James in the New Statesman supplement of 21 January 2008 on Innovation and Change, entitled ‘Listening to the Customer’, where he states:
‘Nobody knows customer needs better thanthe customers themselves and by aggregating their views, customer-centric innovation emerges.’
This is reinforced in the same supplement by Simon Parker of Demos stating in an article about local government that:
‘The cutting edge is all about using the experiences and insights of the public as a spur to redesign services.’
None of which, in my opinion, will come from performance indicators but rather from proper channel managment based upon customer feedback (good and bad)!
The Great E-mancipator 