The Consumer as a Citizen, is the UK Government Doing Enough?
It argues that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and e-Government are not ends in and of themselves, but rather key enablers that can help authorities meet two more fundamental needs:
I. The need to show a visible and sustained improvement in the services delivered despite the background of increased demands for services coupled with limited funding. The challenge is to be seen to be providing more for less.
II. The need to demonstrate, as more services are delivered through partnerships and levels of participation in local government declines, the value of acting as community leader. The challenge is to move from delivering services to sensing and responding to local needs and co-ordinating service provision. This implies a radical shift in vision, culture, competencies and activities.
These two needs are not mutually exclusive. This report shows how the paths to improving service delivery and towards citizen-centricity start from the same point:
- Understanding what matters to customers and what ’value’ looks like in their terms.
- Seizing the opportunity to generate cash or capacity through eliminating waste in service provision by redesigning services from an outside-in, end-to-end perspective.
- Involving front-line staff and their managers in the re-design process. The journey staff go through to assess and re-design the services they deliver is as important to sustainability as outcomes themselves.
- Using performance measures and their review in a radically different fashion that informs, energises and sustains the drive for citizen-centricity and value for money.
- Adopting a benefits-driven approach to investment in technology, viewing potential applications through the two lenses of: (a) what matters to the customer; and (b) what matters to the authority – and then tracking benefits through from business case planning to ultimate realisation.
The evidence we set out in this report is both indisputable and compelling. The approach we advocate enables authorities to transform costs to serve and the customer experience.
There are many factors that determine how citizen-centric a local authority is. These vary from the way it involves local people in decision-making, through the access opportunities it offers its citizens and the training it gives its staff, to the effectiveness with which it exploits the potential of new technology. We have therefore had to be selective in this report, focusing on a few key themes.
The report itself is divided into two main sections. The first section, Setting the Context, examines two major external priorities for authorities – consulting citizens and joining up service delivery through partnerships – and reaches six conclusions.
The second section of the report, Building the Citizen-Centric Authority, looks at key aspects of the work needed within most authorities to improve responsiveness to citizens and the cost effectiveness of services, ranging from re-designing processes to measuring performance.
Drawing on insights from successful and unsuccessful projects in the fields of CRM, major change management, business process re-engineering and performance measurement, this section provides practical and actionable guidance on what works and what does not. It sets out thirty-eight key recommendations to guide authorities on the journey towards greater customer-centricity and better service delivery.
Although these recommendations are tailored to UK local authorities, they are founded on principles of best practice that have been proved in other public sector bodies, as well as in commercial organisations.
Section One – Setting the Context
Engaging with citizens – Chapter 3
A major priority for any local authority is to engage locally, not just with service users and citizens, but also with a wide range of other stakeholders. Chapter 3, Engaging with Citizens, begins by analysing the different types of stakeholder and potential levels of engagement with them, from information-giving to joint action. It then looks in more detail at the mechanics of public engagement, including how information technology can help, before setting out a comprehensive stakeholder management cycle.
This chapter concludes that local authorities need to engage with local stakeholders in ever more effective ways, and this requires new skills and perspectives, as well as a more coherent management approach. Appendix 1 applies some of these lessons to the experience of citizen-based budgeting in the UK.
Key conclusions
1. Citizens will be engaged more extensively than ever, in future not only as individuals, but also as stakeholder groups, who will take on an increasingly visible role in community decision-making.
2. This places a new obligation on authorities to consider how best to manage their stakeholder communities and to develop relationships with them that add value to policy-making and to implementation programmes. It will also require both members and officers to develop new skills and perspectives.
3. Tools and strategies developed under the banner of e-Government have much to contribute in this area and will be used by leading-edge councils to become more citizen-centric as part of the overall modernisation agenda.
Delivering Joined-Up Services – Chapter 4
Local authorities cannot do everything themselves. They share their customer base, and many of their activities, with other local and national organisations. So joining up remains a key theme. Chapter 4, Delivering Joined-Up Services, distinguishes between joined-up policy-making and joined-up implementation. It examines a number of ways of stimulating joined-up service delivery both within and between individual public service bodies, including informal networking, joint projects and formal partnerships.
A final section looks at the potential role of third-party intermediaries. The chapter concludes that effective joining up will make huge demands on both councillors and officers to change the way they operate.
Key conclusions
4. The implications of joined-up service delivery for local authorities and other public bodies may be far-reaching, but are not yet easy to specify in detail. Much depends upon the ease with which councils move into their new role of community leadership and pulling together the work of the many service delivery agencies working within their area. This is a decade-long programme, and the mechanisms outlined in this chapter may yet be supplemented by new ways of joined-up working.
5. What is clear is that there is tension between delivering traditional services to citizens on tight budgets and the task of simultaneously developing new and innovative services in accordance with the Government's modernisation agenda. This places significant demands upon local government officers and their advisors, and may even require councillors to relinquish some of the autonomy they have traditionally protected in order to safeguard their electoral base.
6. Partnership working and joined-up government will, for many authorities, mean a loss of control over significant parts of delivered services, the performance of which councillors believe influences the way citizens vote. Squaring this circle and avoiding the creation of a new democratic deficit remains a challenge.
Section Two – Building the Citizen-Centric Authority
Delivering a Good Customer Service Experience – Chapter 5
The demand from citizens for contact with their public services can seem insatiable. In the past, poor access often helped to regulate contacts, but at the expense of those citizens who were less able or persistent. As local authorities and other public bodies have improved their contact channels, there has been a growing awareness of the true extent of hidden demand, particularly for telephone contact and e-mail. Providing a good ‘customer service’ experience in conditions of high and rising demand poses a significant challenge.
In addition to responding well to customer contacts, the actual services themselves need to deliver a good experience too. Chapter 5, Delivering a Good Customer Experience, examines what this might mean in practice and addresses the following questions:
- What characterises good customer service, both as an overall concept and at a day-to-day level?
- What constitutes effective customer service in the online world and what can be learned from the experiences of the commercial sector?
- How can we get started on improving the customer service experience in general and the online customer service experience in particular?
Key recommendations
1. Measure the elements of the actual experience that matter most to customers. Do this frequently and action the findings. Feed back compliments rapidly to front-line staff.
2. Distinguish between the experience that the authority wants to provide (within financial constraints), the experience citizens expect, and the experience they actually receive, and work on all three. Build skills in managing citizens’ expectations whilst continually seeking to improve the experience actually delivered.
3. Prioritise investment in customer experience according to what matters most to customers. Do this across access channels, delivery partners and services, and establish clear accountability for outcomes. Ensure that local staff and their managers are intimately involved in this process.
4. Give one person accountability, with the power to switch budgets between, for example, e-Government, performance management, corporate contact centres, customer services and service lines, accountability for optimising both the end-to-end user experience and overall cost-effectiveness.
5. View online service in the context of a wider analysis of the patterns of customer demand. Understand the hurdles to transacting online and systematically seek to reduce them.
Process Improvement and the Elimination of Waste – Chapter 6
Creating better access and more effective initial contact handling is an important starting point for improving the citizen’s experience of dealing with local government, but reworking back-office processes is equally fundamental.
Process improvement should go hand in hand with the adoption of transformational technologies, in a symbiotic relationship. At the design stage, technology informs process re-design with the art of the possible, and optimised process flows determine systems requirements. Financially, most investments in technology can only be funded through savings from process improvement.
Chapter 6, Process Improvement and the Elimination of Waste, looks at how work can be re-designed in ways that systematically eliminate waste, release capacity, and both engage and energise staff, as well as radically improve the end-user experience of citizens.
We highlight, in particular, the key opportunities to:
- identify and progressively eliminate huge levels of hidden waste that organisations typically fail to see
- improve services from an outside-in, end-to-end, systemic perspective, across organisational boundaries where necessary
- involve managers and staff, in all functions – from front-line service delivery to shared administrative services – in developing a ‘sensing-and-responding’ culture, which strives for optimum value and powers ongoing continual improvement (which is not as difficult as it sounds to put in place).
Key recommendations
There is a significant opportunity for authorities to release resources and create increases in service capacity through a root-and-branch re-design of the way in which services are delivered. The prize is massive.
6. The key to service improvement is understanding the nature of demand and what matters to customers. Improving access to public services is useful but not sufficient.
7. Recognising unwanted and avoidable causes of demand for services presents a powerful insight for service re-design and improvement. It is important to train front-line staff and managers to recognise waste.
8. Service design should be based on the principles of: (a) designing against demand; (b) optimising flow; and (c) systematically identifying and eliminating waste.
9. Contact centres can play a valuable role as ‘the eyes and ears’ of the organisation, both in terms of what matters to customers and how services currently perform.
10. The ultimate opportunity is to create a sensing-and-responding culture throughout the organisation.
Measuring Performance – Chapter 7
Performance measurement, as currently applied – especially in the context of the widespread misuse of target-setting – often acts as an unseen ‘glass ceiling’ on an organisation’s potential to deliver. Hence, changing the measurement and management process in an organisation can be one of the quickest, cheapest and easiest ways to stimulate improved performance.
The potential benefits, from a local authority perspective, in tackling the issue of performance measurement are threefold:
- Changing the way the authority thinks about performance measurement and management costs relatively little. There is typically no need to make massive investments in new computer equipment nor to implement major programmes of organisational restructuring. Little or no additional public investment is required.
- The benefits, in terms of measurable improvement, can usually be seen very quickly, thereby raising confidence both internally and externally.
- Being able to demonstrate improved productivity and better service outcomes can attract additional resources from external funding sources. By showing how the resources currently at its disposal are being used more effectively, an authority can make a strong case for additional investment to finance those improvements that really do require extra funding.
Chapter 7, Using Performance Measurement to Improve Service Delivery, examines how managers can use performance measurement to drive real benefits while avoiding the dysfunctional effects of arbitrary numerical targets. It argues that we need to develop new ways of thinking about performance measurement, focusing on measures that really matter to citizens and making variation visible. It also explores how we can build effective structures and processes for performance management and how data can be presented in new ways, and goes on to suggest how the implementation of new performance management approaches can best be handled, and concludes that performance measurement activity needs to be sustained by the conscious and rigorous tracking of benefits.
Appendix 2 gives a practical example of how charting can be used to display performance.
Key recommendations
11. Grab the review process, and make it work properly. The secret of successful performance measurement lies, not in the measures themselves, but in the review process. In addition, implementing an effective review process at corporate and departmental level early on creates the necessary updraught of management attention downstream.
12. Make variation visible for all process-based measures. The software to do this now is so inexpensive as to be affordable by all.
13. Ensure that measures that really matter to customers are included in systemic sets of performance indicators at appropriate levels in the organisation. Encourage members and executives to insist on seeing performance against measures that matter to customers presented visually, highlighting variation as well as average performance.
14. Teach staff how to distinguish between the different uses of performance measurement for: (a) planning and budgeting purposes; and (b) to facilitate fundamental, systematic improvement.
15. Determine appropriate improvement aspirations only after analysing current capability and levels of waste.
16. Go for early successes, and track benefit realisation rigorously downstream.
Making the Business Case – Chapter 8
Chapter 8, Making the Business Case and Realising the Benefits, encourages authorities to use the business case as the glue that binds planned economic benefits to the change management issues and project controls. If these ties are permanent and politically compelling, improvement initiatives will not unravel, political support will remain solid, planned benefits will be driven through, and the necessary change programmes will materialise.
To do this, the business case has to:
- Recognise it needs to go beyond pure financials to address the political, change and benefits realisation issues too. Most business cases serve multiple purposes. They are intended to analyse, justify, communicate, persuade, plan and control.
- Integrate tightly into a benefits realisation process that runs in parallel with project management. In the absence of a strongly enforced strategy for benefit capture – perhaps set and led by the finance department – service heads will naturally tend to absorb resulting incremental cost savings into other schemes or activities. In other words, the default response is to translate resulting benefits into increases in capacity, rather than reductions in budgetary spend (available to be re-allocated elsewhere).
- Contain a clear articulation of what will change on the ground, why and how.
This chapter explores each of these aspects in turn, starting with the role of the business case. In doing so, it draws on the authors’ work for the National CRM Project on the CRM Business Case Toolkit.
Key recommendations
17. Plan benefits with sufficient precision and certainty to enable managers to decide how to cash the cheque from their investments, including whether to consciously redeploy resources to other areas of significant need.
18. Make reviews proactive, frequent and conducted without blame. Everyone should be prepared to accept that initial estimates of costs and benefits may be wrong.
19. Start with: (a) the facts about how services are really being delivered on the ground, not with how managers think they are being delivered; and (b) the current economics of service delivery. Put these in the open as soon as possible so there are no surprises downstream – good or bad – as the project progresses.
20. At the outset of an improvement programme, base the high-level business case on cause-and-effect models around key themes, such as customer satisfaction and the economics of call handling, which feed into the assessment of benefits, costs and risks. Use the high-level business case to demonstrate how proposals will result in a significant change on the ground. Ensure that the performance measures used to monitor progress are aligned with and support the underlying models of cause and effect used in the business case.
21. Wherever possible, major opportunities for improvement should be expressed in measurable terms (ideally financial, where funding is a concern). For benefits to materialise, managers need to overcome their reluctance to accept the estimates that are needed to convert intangible or ‘soft’ benefits into hard targets and outcomes. Measures focus the attention of teams and other stakeholders, and the process of measuring and analysing improvements in performance not only accelerates the pace of change, but also increases accountability and creates a basis for action. The quantification of intangible benefits also improves understanding of cause-and-effect relationships and the economics of any proposals.
22. Track benefits throughout the improvement process, as they progress through four buckets: opportunity, scoped, planned and delivered.
23. Keep the emphasis on analysing desired changes and outcomes in terms of how they might be achieved, rather than reviewing the range of technical solutions and their relative costs.
Using Technology to Serve Customers Better – Chapter 9
Serving customers better is not primarily a technology issue. However, many of the opportunities for improvement are enabled by exploiting modern information and communications technology (ICT). In recent years, CRM systems, in particular, have held out the promise to authorities of much more effective interactions with citizens.
Chapter 9, Using Technology to Serve Customers Better, starts by highlighting the design options and issues that have arisen from early CRM implementations in local government.
It then goes on to examine a range of citizen-related activities that local authorities have to manage, such as:
- contact management
- information provision and transaction management
- case management
- entitlement management
- scheduling management
- citizenship management.
Against each of these activities, we ask how ICT can help, and test the contribution that CRM and associated technologies, such as workflow, knowledge tools and personalisation, can make.
The final section of this chapter offers observations on making the use of ICT more effective through better procurement, phasing, choice of software, joint working, and bidding for external funds.
Key recommendations
24. CRM systems are not viable as solutions in themselves. There are important decisions to be made about what is done in the CRM system and what is done elsewhere. Without doubt, CRM systems can act as a critical overall customer-oriented ‘gateway’ into older applications, or undertake the greater part of the processing.
25. There is an unparalled opportunity to use the momentum from CRM, Customer First and e-Government to focus effort on the redesign of services end to end, so transforming the customer experience as well as the cost to serve.
26. The combination of CRM software, telephony and communications infrastructure is, in reality, providing authorities with the opportunity to transform call handling and adopt highly cost-effective processes. These technologies provide alternatives for how calls are routed, to whom, what gets done in the call and how the call-handling function is organised. However, the role of a contact centre or other technology-enabled initiatives can only be determined properly once a real understanding of service demand and the organisation’s desired response has been established.
27. We are starting to see cost savings from Electronic Service Delivery with notable successes involving businesses where use of the Internet is more pervasive and grounded in everyday working practices.
28. The combination of scripting and workflow enables front-line staff to transact many types of enquiry in one customer dialogue. This is the cheapest and most effective way to handle large volumes of calls.
29. CRM systems ‘case management’ functionality is highly relevant and supports a workflow that might involve interrogating different knowledge bases, following complex sign-off procedures and obtaining authority for decision-making, managing service level agreements, handling escalations and referrals, and distributing and storing electronic documents.
30. There is a sequence of phased activities for entitlement that CRM systems support well. Analysing entitlement in this way enables the architects of CRM systems to see the common procedural elements that have hitherto been buried deep inside individual business applications.
31. CRM vendors have an important role in facilitating economies of scale. This means making their productivity tools, such as adapters, scripts and process maps, available to all customers and facilitating user groups and best practice forums.
Effective Change Management – Chapter 10
Underpinning any drive for improvement is effective change management. Chapter 10, Effective Change Management, the final part of our report, addresses this issue.
This chapter starts by examining the key differences between local government and the commercial world, including the absence of customer choice for many council services and the diversity of activity to be found in even the smallest authority. It then looks at the reasons why change might be resisted, drawing on the ‘change equation’, and suggests strategies for overcoming such resistance.
The second part of this chapter sets out an integrated model for managing change in the public sector, exploring the role that the corporate centre can take in stimulating progress. A final section looks at the role of elected members in managing change, arguing that much current ‘benchmarking’ activity is unproductive.
Key recommendations
32. Start with a rigorous ‘assessment phase’, before proceeding to an ongoing cycle of ‘Plan-Do-Review’ – otherwise plans are likely to be misconceived and grounded on sand.
33. Recognise that bringing in the ‘voice of the customer’ is key to creating an ‘informed dissatisfaction’ with the status quo. This, in turn, is one of the key factors in facilitating change in the local authority arena.
34. Fundamental, beneficial change – involving more than just mandated structural or technological change – is unlikely to happen or be sustained unless both the way the work gets done and the way the organisation is managed are changed concurrently.
35. Managing change needs to be treated as an integral part of the ‘day job’, not something to be done separately if time allows.
36. Build a cadre of specialists in change management, through systematic training and apprenticeship.
37. Prioritisation, implementation and benefits realisation are essential to effective change management. They imply active facilitation and review.
38. Members have an important role to play in visiting other authorities, observing the art of the possible at first hand, so as to be in a position to put pressure on their own authorities to do things better. However, benchmarking visits by managers are typically a waste of time. There is a big difference between knowing that something can be done better and being able to do it.
Research and Markets has announced the addition of Towards a Citizen-Centric Authority: Beyond CRM, e-Government and the Modernising Agenda in the Public Sector to their offering.
As the UK government's 2005 targets loom closer, this is a timely consideration of progress in this critical area and a sharp look at what still needs to be done. Increasing public sector expenditure and effective services to citizens are not always linked. The UK experience over the last two to three years is an attempt to bring the experience of the consumer as a citizen closer to that available in the private sector. The evidence is that many authorities have made real progress, and these are detailed in the report; yet too many projects are tactical and carried out to meet deadlines, not strategies.
This report carries a simple but important message - Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and e-Government are not ends in and of themselves, but rather key enablers that can help authorities meet two more fundamental needs outlined in this report.
The report itself is divided into two main sections. The first section, Setting the Context, examines two major external priorities for authorities - consulting citizens and joining up service delivery through partnerships - and reaches six conclusions.
The second section of the report, Building the Citizen-Centric Authority, looks at key aspects of the work needed within most authorities to improve responsiveness to citizens and the cost effectiveness of services, ranging from redesigning processes to measuring performance.
Features of the report include:
- Numerous case studies of local authorities
- Detailed insight into local government and the Modernising Agenda, including joined-up Government, engaging with citizens, the role of ICT
- Making ICT affordable
- Insights from early projects with examples of leading-edge local authorities
- Recommendations for solution providers and the public sector
- A roadmap to show what the CRM vision is and how it can be achieved
- A robust business case that is credible and affordable
- How to achieve change and organisational transformation
- How to deliver a good customer experience
- Profiles of leading solution providers to the UK public sector
The report is relevant to both the UK and Europe, North America and Asia Pacific and is of major interest to both the Commercial and Public Sector, in particular:
- Chief Executives
- Customer Service Heads
- e-Government Managers
- ICT Managers
- Solution Providers
- Systems Integrators
- Consultants
Why Solution Providers, Systems Integrators and Consultants Should Read this Report
- The public sector is currently one of the biggest application areas for CRM - not just in the UK, but also in Europe, Asia Pacific and North America. However, the use of new technologies in this area could still be considered to be underdeveloped.
- Having researched the public sector for three years, Hewson Group believes that the biggest barrier to the adoption of CRM is that there is no useful and actionable vision of what CRM means. Indeed, the need to assist government bodies to articulate a CRM vision that leverages IT, is actionable and will deliver hard benefits, has been recognised by SOLACE, the ODPM, and by the National CRM Project.
- The report addresses these issues and allows a better understanding of government and the modernisation agenda, and what authorities really need from solution providers. - The report offers a unique insight into the Public Sector market by using in-depth analysis, case studies and examples of leading-edge thinking in public authorities.
- Transforming services and building a citizen-centric authority is a huge challenge, presenting managers with many perplexing decisions. This comprehensive report provides practical, straight-forward advice and step-by-step guidance.
- It provides a clear roadmap for service transformation, showing what to do and where to start. You will learn what has been accomplished so far in the UK Public Sector, which is an acknowledged world leader in terms of service transformation.
- The numerous case studies and examples are intended to show what has been successfully achieved by leading-edge local authorities, providing a model of best practice. The report also shows what pit-falls to avoid, drawing on lessons learned from the private sector.
- Numerous strategies, processes and technologies are evaluated, many of which are simple to implement. The findings demonstrate that, with the right tools and strategies, services can be improved with minimum cost and maximum benefit to both the authority and the citizen. For example, re-designing services to reduce unwanted demand into local offices and contact centres can improve capacity in services by anything between 8 per cent to 75 per cent, thus reducing costs and improving service.
- The report covers all organisational aspects of modernising public services, ranging from engaging with citizens; joined-up government; how to deliver a good customer experience; the use of ICT and how to make technology affordable; process improvement; performance measurement; effective change management. It will prove invaluable in helping you to plan for and manage transformation, and demonstrates how benefits can be sustained.
- Preface
- Executive Summary and Key Themes
- Engaging with Citizens
- Delivering Joined-Up Services
- Delivering a Good Customer Service Experience
- Process Improvement and the Elimination of Waste
- Using Performance Measurement to Improve Service Delivery
- Making the Business Case and Realising the Benefits
- Using Technology to Serve Customers Better 10 Effective Change Management
It argues that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and e-Government are not ends in and of themselves, but rather key enablers that can help authorities meet two more fundamental needs:
I. The need to show a visible and sustained improvement in the services delivered despite the background of increased demands for services coupled with limited funding. The challenge is to be seen to be providing more for less.
II. The need to demonstrate, as more services are delivered through partnerships and levels of participation in local government declines, the value of acting as community leader. The challenge is to move from delivering services to sensing and responding to local needs and co-ordinating service provision. This implies a radical shift in vision, culture, competencies and activities.
These two needs are not mutually exclusive. This report shows how the paths to improving service delivery and towards citizen-centricity start from the same point:
- Understanding what matters to customers and what ’value’ looks like in their terms.
- Seizing the opportunity to generate cash or capacity through eliminating waste in service provision by redesigning services from an outside-in, end-to-end perspective.
- Involving front-line staff and their managers in the re-design process. The journey staff go through to assess and re-design the services they deliver is as important to sustainability as outcomes themselves.
- Using performance measures and their review in a radically different fashion that informs, energises and sustains the drive for citizen-centricity and value for money.
- Adopting a benefits-driven approach to investment in technology, viewing potential applications through the two lenses of: (a) what matters to the customer; and (b) what matters to the authority – and then tracking benefits through from business case planning to ultimate realisation.
The evidence we set out in this report is both indisputable and compelling. The approach we advocate enables authorities to transform costs to serve and the customer experience.
There are many factors that determine how citizen-centric a local authority is. These vary from the way it involves local people in decision-making, through the access opportunities it offers its citizens and the training it gives its staff, to the effectiveness with which it exploits the potential of new technology. We have therefore had to be selective in this report, focusing on a few key themes.
The report itself is divided into two main sections. The first section, Setting the Context, examines two major external priorities for authorities – consulting citizens and joining up service delivery through partnerships – and reaches six conclusions.
The second section of the report, Building the Citizen-Centric Authority, looks at key aspects of the work needed within most authorities to improve responsiveness to citizens and the cost effectiveness of services, ranging from re-designing processes to measuring performance.
Drawing on insights from successful and unsuccessful projects in the fields of CRM, major change management, business process re-engineering and performance measurement, this section provides practical and actionable guidance on what works and what does not. It sets out thirty-eight key recommendations to guide authorities on the journey towards greater customer-centricity and better service delivery.
Although these recommendations are tailored to UK local authorities, they are founded on principles of best practice that have been proved in other public sector bodies, as well as in commercial organisations.
Section One – Setting the Context
Engaging with citizens – Chapter 3
A major priority for any local authority is to engage locally, not just with service users and citizens, but also with a wide range of other stakeholders. Chapter 3, Engaging with Citizens, begins by analysing the different types of stakeholder and potential levels of engagement with them, from information-giving to joint action. It then looks in more detail at the mechanics of public engagement, including how information technology can help, before setting out a comprehensive stakeholder management cycle.
This chapter concludes that local authorities need to engage with local stakeholders in ever more effective ways, and this requires new skills and perspectives, as well as a more coherent management approach. Appendix 1 applies some of these lessons to the experience of citizen-based budgeting in the UK.
Key conclusions
1. Citizens will be engaged more extensively than ever, in future not only as individuals, but also as stakeholder groups, who will take on an increasingly visible role in community decision-making.
2. This places a new obligation on authorities to consider how best to manage their stakeholder communities and to develop relationships with them that add value to policy-making and to implementation programmes. It will also require both members and officers to develop new skills and perspectives.
3. Tools and strategies developed under the banner of e-Government have much to contribute in this area and will be used by leading-edge councils to become more citizen-centric as part of the overall modernisation agenda.
Delivering Joined-Up Services – Chapter 4
Local authorities cannot do everything themselves. They share their customer base, and many of their activities, with other local and national organisations. So joining up remains a key theme. Chapter 4, Delivering Joined-Up Services, distinguishes between joined-up policy-making and joined-up implementation. It examines a number of ways of stimulating joined-up service delivery both within and between individual public service bodies, including informal networking, joint projects and formal partnerships.
A final section looks at the potential role of third-party intermediaries. The chapter concludes that effective joining up will make huge demands on both councillors and officers to change the way they operate.
Key conclusions
4. The implications of joined-up service delivery for local authorities and other public bodies may be far-reaching, but are not yet easy to specify in detail. Much depends upon the ease with which councils move into their new role of community leadership and pulling together the work of the many service delivery agencies working within their area. This is a decade-long programme, and the mechanisms outlined in this chapter may yet be supplemented by new ways of joined-up working.
5. What is clear is that there is tension between delivering traditional services to citizens on tight budgets and the task of simultaneously developing new and innovative services in accordance with the Government's modernisation agenda. This places significant demands upon local government officers and their advisors, and may even require councillors to relinquish some of the autonomy they have traditionally protected in order to safeguard their electoral base.
6. Partnership working and joined-up government will, for many authorities, mean a loss of control over significant parts of delivered services, the performance of which councillors believe influences the way citizens vote. Squaring this circle and avoiding the creation of a new democratic deficit remains a challenge.
Section Two – Building the Citizen-Centric Authority
Delivering a Good Customer Service Experience – Chapter 5
The demand from citizens for contact with their public services can seem insatiable. In the past, poor access often helped to regulate contacts, but at the expense of those citizens who were less able or persistent. As local authorities and other public bodies have improved their contact channels, there has been a growing awareness of the true extent of hidden demand, particularly for telephone contact and e-mail. Providing a good ‘customer service’ experience in conditions of high and rising demand poses a significant challenge.
In addition to responding well to customer contacts, the actual services themselves need to deliver a good experience too. Chapter 5, Delivering a Good Customer Experience, examines what this might mean in practice and addresses the following questions:
- What characterises good customer service, both as an overall concept and at a day-to-day level?
- What constitutes effective customer service in the online world and what can be learned from the experiences of the commercial sector?
- How can we get started on improving the customer service experience in general and the online customer service experience in particular?
Key recommendations
1. Measure the elements of the actual experience that matter most to customers. Do this frequently and action the findings. Feed back compliments rapidly to front-line staff.
2. Distinguish between the experience that the authority wants to provide (within financial constraints), the experience citizens expect, and the experience they actually receive, and work on all three. Build skills in managing citizens’ expectations whilst continually seeking to improve the experience actually delivered.
3. Prioritise investment in customer experience according to what matters most to customers. Do this across access channels, delivery partners and services, and establish clear accountability for outcomes. Ensure that local staff and their managers are intimately involved in this process.
4. Give one person accountability, with the power to switch budgets between, for example, e-Government, performance management, corporate contact centres, customer services and service lines, accountability for optimising both the end-to-end user experience and overall cost-effectiveness.
5. View online service in the context of a wider analysis of the patterns of customer demand. Understand the hurdles to transacting online and systematically seek to reduce them.
Process Improvement and the Elimination of Waste – Chapter 6
Creating better access and more effective initial contact handling is an important starting point for improving the citizen’s experience of dealing with local government, but reworking back-office processes is equally fundamental.
Process improvement should go hand in hand with the adoption of transformational technologies, in a symbiotic relationship. At the design stage, technology informs process re-design with the art of the possible, and optimised process flows determine systems requirements. Financially, most investments in technology can only be funded through savings from process improvement.
Chapter 6, Process Improvement and the Elimination of Waste, looks at how work can be re-designed in ways that systematically eliminate waste, release capacity, and both engage and energise staff, as well as radically improve the end-user experience of citizens.
We highlight, in particular, the key opportunities to:
- identify and progressively eliminate huge levels of hidden waste that organisations typically fail to see
- improve services from an outside-in, end-to-end, systemic perspective, across organisational boundaries where necessary
- involve managers and staff, in all functions – from front-line service delivery to shared administrative services – in developing a ‘sensing-and-responding’ culture, which strives for optimum value and powers ongoing continual improvement (which is not as difficult as it sounds to put in place).
Key recommendations
There is a significant opportunity for authorities to release resources and create increases in service capacity through a root-and-branch re-design of the way in which services are delivered. The prize is massive.
6. The key to service improvement is understanding the nature of demand and what matters to customers. Improving access to public services is useful but not sufficient.
7. Recognising unwanted and avoidable causes of demand for services presents a powerful insight for service re-design and improvement. It is important to train front-line staff and managers to recognise waste.
8. Service design should be based on the principles of: (a) designing against demand; (b) optimising flow; and (c) systematically identifying and eliminating waste.
9. Contact centres can play a valuable role as ‘the eyes and ears’ of the organisation, both in terms of what matters to customers and how services currently perform.
10. The ultimate opportunity is to create a sensing-and-responding culture throughout the organisation.
Measuring Performance – Chapter 7
Performance measurement, as currently applied – especially in the context of the widespread misuse of target-setting – often acts as an unseen ‘glass ceiling’ on an organisation’s potential to deliver. Hence, changing the measurement and management process in an organisation can be one of the quickest, cheapest and easiest ways to stimulate improved performance.
The potential benefits, from a local authority perspective, in tackling the issue of performance measurement are threefold:
- Changing the way the authority thinks about performance measurement and management costs relatively little. There is typically no need to make massive investments in new computer equipment nor to implement major programmes of organisational restructuring. Little or no additional public investment is required.
- The benefits, in terms of measurable improvement, can usually be seen very quickly, thereby raising confidence both internally and externally.
- Being able to demonstrate improved productivity and better service outcomes can attract additional resources from external funding sources. By showing how the resources currently at its disposal are being used more effectively, an authority can make a strong case for additional investment to finance those improvements that really do require extra funding.
Chapter 7, Using Performance Measurement to Improve Service Delivery, examines how managers can use performance measurement to drive real benefits while avoiding the dysfunctional effects of arbitrary numerical targets. It argues that we need to develop new ways of thinking about performance measurement, focusing on measures that really matter to citizens and making variation visible. It also explores how we can build effective structures and processes for performance management and how data can be presented in new ways, and goes on to suggest how the implementation of new performance management approaches can best be handled, and concludes that performance measurement activity needs to be sustained by the conscious and rigorous tracking of benefits.
Appendix 2 gives a practical example of how charting can be used to display performance.
Key recommendations
11. Grab the review process, and make it work properly. The secret of successful performance measurement lies, not in the measures themselves, but in the review process. In addition, implementing an effective review process at corporate and departmental level early on creates the necessary updraught of management attention downstream.
12. Make variation visible for all process-based measures. The software to do this now is so inexpensive as to be affordable by all.
13. Ensure that measures that really matter to customers are included in systemic sets of performance indicators at appropriate levels in the organisation. Encourage members and executives to insist on seeing performance against measures that matter to customers presented visually, highlighting variation as well as average performance.
14. Teach staff how to distinguish between the different uses of performance measurement for: (a) planning and budgeting purposes; and (b) to facilitate fundamental, systematic improvement.
15. Determine appropriate improvement aspirations only after analysing current capability and levels of waste.
16. Go for early successes, and track benefit realisation rigorously downstream.
Making the Business Case – Chapter 8
Chapter 8, Making the Business Case and Realising the Benefits, encourages authorities to use the business case as the glue that binds planned economic benefits to the change management issues and project controls. If these ties are permanent and politically compelling, improvement initiatives will not unravel, political support will remain solid, planned benefits will be driven through, and the necessary change programmes will materialise.
To do this, the business case has to:
- Recognise it needs to go beyond pure financials to address the political, change and benefits realisation issues too. Most business cases serve multiple purposes. They are intended to analyse, justify, communicate, persuade, plan and control.
- Integrate tightly into a benefits realisation process that runs in parallel with project management. In the absence of a strongly enforced strategy for benefit capture – perhaps set and led by the finance department – service heads will naturally tend to absorb resulting incremental cost savings into other schemes or activities. In other words, the default response is to translate resulting benefits into increases in capacity, rather than reductions in budgetary spend (available to be re-allocated elsewhere).
- Contain a clear articulation of what will change on the ground, why and how.
This chapter explores each of these aspects in turn, starting with the role of the business case. In doing so, it draws on the authors’ work for the National CRM Project on the CRM Business Case Toolkit.
Key recommendations
17. Plan benefits with sufficient precision and certainty to enable managers to decide how to cash the cheque from their investments, including whether to consciously redeploy resources to other areas of significant need.
18. Make reviews proactive, frequent and conducted without blame. Everyone should be prepared to accept that initial estimates of costs and benefits may be wrong.
19. Start with: (a) the facts about how services are really being delivered on the ground, not with how managers think they are being delivered; and (b) the current economics of service delivery. Put these in the open as soon as possible so there are no surprises downstream – good or bad – as the project progresses.
20. At the outset of an improvement programme, base the high-level business case on cause-and-effect models around key themes, such as customer satisfaction and the economics of call handling, which feed into the assessment of benefits, costs and risks. Use the high-level business case to demonstrate how proposals will result in a significant change on the ground. Ensure that the performance measures used to monitor progress are aligned with and support the underlying models of cause and effect used in the business case.
21. Wherever possible, major opportunities for improvement should be expressed in measurable terms (ideally financial, where funding is a concern). For benefits to materialise, managers need to overcome their reluctance to accept the estimates that are needed to convert intangible or ‘soft’ benefits into hard targets and outcomes. Measures focus the attention of teams and other stakeholders, and the process of measuring and analysing improvements in performance not only accelerates the pace of change, but also increases accountability and creates a basis for action. The quantification of intangible benefits also improves understanding of cause-and-effect relationships and the economics of any proposals.
22. Track benefits throughout the improvement process, as they progress through four buckets: opportunity, scoped, planned and delivered.
23. Keep the emphasis on analysing desired changes and outcomes in terms of how they might be achieved, rather than reviewing the range of technical solutions and their relative costs.
Using Technology to Serve Customers Better – Chapter 9
Serving customers better is not primarily a technology issue. However, many of the opportunities for improvement are enabled by exploiting modern information and communications technology (ICT). In recent years, CRM systems, in particular, have held out the promise to authorities of much more effective interactions with citizens.
Chapter 9, Using Technology to Serve Customers Better, starts by highlighting the design options and issues that have arisen from early CRM implementations in local government.
It then goes on to examine a range of citizen-related activities that local authorities have to manage, such as:
- contact management
- information provision and transaction management
- case management
- entitlement management
- scheduling management
- citizenship management.
Against each of these activities, we ask how ICT can help, and test the contribution that CRM and associated technologies, such as workflow, knowledge tools and personalisation, can make.
The final section of this chapter offers observations on making the use of ICT more effective through better procurement, phasing, choice of software, joint working, and bidding for external funds.
Key recommendations
24. CRM systems are not viable as solutions in themselves. There are important decisions to be made about what is done in the CRM system and what is done elsewhere. Without doubt, CRM systems can act as a critical overall customer-oriented ‘gateway’ into older applications, or undertake the greater part of the processing.
25. There is an unparalled opportunity to use the momentum from CRM, Customer First and e-Government to focus effort on the redesign of services end to end, so transforming the customer experience as well as the cost to serve.
26. The combination of CRM software, telephony and communications infrastructure is, in reality, providing authorities with the opportunity to transform call handling and adopt highly cost-effective processes. These technologies provide alternatives for how calls are routed, to whom, what gets done in the call and how the call-handling function is organised. However, the role of a contact centre or other technology-enabled initiatives can only be determined properly once a real understanding of service demand and the organisation’s desired response has been established.
27. We are starting to see cost savings from Electronic Service Delivery with notable successes involving businesses where use of the Internet is more pervasive and grounded in everyday working practices.
28. The combination of scripting and workflow enables front-line staff to transact many types of enquiry in one customer dialogue. This is the cheapest and most effective way to handle large volumes of calls.
29. CRM systems ‘case management’ functionality is highly relevant and supports a workflow that might involve interrogating different knowledge bases, following complex sign-off procedures and obtaining authority for decision-making, managing service level agreements, handling escalations and referrals, and distributing and storing electronic documents.
30. There is a sequence of phased activities for entitlement that CRM systems support well. Analysing entitlement in this way enables the architects of CRM systems to see the common procedural elements that have hitherto been buried deep inside individual business applications.
31. CRM vendors have an important role in facilitating economies of scale. This means making their productivity tools, such as adapters, scripts and process maps, available to all customers and facilitating user groups and best practice forums.
Effective Change Management – Chapter 10
Underpinning any drive for improvement is effective change management. Chapter 10, Effective Change Management, the final part of our report, addresses this issue.
This chapter starts by examining the key differences between local government and the commercial world, including the absence of customer choice for many council services and the diversity of activity to be found in even the smallest authority. It then looks at the reasons why change might be resisted, drawing on the ‘change equation’, and suggests strategies for overcoming such resistance.
The second part of this chapter sets out an integrated model for managing change in the public sector, exploring the role that the corporate centre can take in stimulating progress. A final section looks at the role of elected members in managing change, arguing that much current ‘benchmarking’ activity is unproductive.
Key recommendations
32. Start with a rigorous ‘assessment phase’, before proceeding to an ongoing cycle of ‘Plan-Do-Review’ – otherwise plans are likely to be misconceived and grounded on sand.
33. Recognise that bringing in the ‘voice of the customer’ is key to creating an ‘informed dissatisfaction’ with the status quo. This, in turn, is one of the key factors in facilitating change in the local authority arena.
34. Fundamental, beneficial change – involving more than just mandated structural or technological change – is unlikely to happen or be sustained unless both the way the work gets done and the way the organisation is managed are changed concurrently.
35. Managing change needs to be treated as an integral part of the ‘day job’, not something to be done separately if time allows.
36. Build a cadre of specialists in change management, through systematic training and apprenticeship.
37. Prioritisation, implementation and benefits realisation are essential to effective change management. They imply active facilitation and review.
38. Members have an important role to play in visiting other authorities, observing the art of the possible at first hand, so as to be in a position to put pressure on their own authorities to do things better. However, benchmarking visits by managers are typically a waste of time. There is a big difference between knowing that something can be done better and being able to do it.
For more information visit www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c3710
Quelle: Business Wire, 10.08.2004
