Public sector organizations have as large an impact on customers' lives as private sector companies. In many countries, public authorities are trying to extract lessons from the first 20 or so years of private sector experience of CRM. They are asking questions such as:
• What are the lessons from the private sector? Has the private sector itself learnt from its own lessons?
• Are the lessons from the private sector relevant? If so, which are most relevant?
• Which models of customer management in the private sector are most relevant to different public sector operations? Does the answer to this question depend on the size of the public sector operation, or whether it is central, regional or local? Does it depend upon the objectives of the particular public sector operation; in particular on whether it offers customers full or partial options about whether they are to be managed (such as law enforcement, criminal custody, tax payment, versus higher education, employment or information services)?
• What does comparison with the private sector reveal about the main opportunities for improving levels of service while containing cost, or for saving cost while maintaining levels of service?
• Does the change towards more customer-focused ways of doing things have to be handled differently in the public sector, whether because of the political dimension, because of unclear, conflicting or rapidly changing objectives, because of the dominance of cost as an issue, or for any other reason?
• How can progress in the chosen direction be maintained, perhaps accelerated?
The track record of applying measurement-based CRM ideas to the public sector is relatively short; The public sector managers need to explore more relevant CRM Vision and processes before and during application of Private Sector CRM ideas to their domain. This article does not pretend to do anything more than provide a helpful summary of the main issues, and suggest to public sector management how it can learn (or not) from the very varied and problematic experience of the private sector in applying the ideas of customer management.
The term 'public sector' conceals an enormous variety of activities, such as:
• Defense;
• Law and order;
• Foreign affairs;
• Industrial - whether as a direct government activity, as a regulator or provider of support services;
• Revenue raising, eg taxation;
• Providing income, eg pensions, social benefits;
• Transport, whether infrastructure - airports, roads, traffic signals, testing, surveillance, or direct provision of public transport services;
• Postal and telecommunications services, regulation, infrastructure support;
• control over airspace, airwaves;
• health service provision, and inspection and audit or private provision;
• welfare, e.g. infrastructure and services: old people's homes, day centres, provision of access or funding;
• Education, leisure, arts.
Just as in the private sector, interaction between customers can be classified as case processing, involving in-depth diagnosis of need/qualification and possibly protracted interaction, or as transaction processing, involving relatively quick interaction with a very large number of standard cases. In practice many situations are some mixture of these two. However, the two have very different process, human resources, systems and data needs.
Examples of case management and processing include:
• child protection;
• legal aid;
• tax returns;
• hospitalization;
• prosecution for serious offences;
• treatment of chronic disease;
• housing;
• planning authorization;
• inspecting/testing compliance (eg weights and measures, health and safety, education);
• entitlement to education/loans;
• security/accident incident management;
• complex license allocation;
• Complex complaints and queries.
• Municipal Services
• Judiciary Penalty Imposition
• ETC …………………………….
Examples of transaction processing include:
• benefit payment;
• routine inoculation;
• simple licence allocation, eg driving, motor vehicle, broadcast reception;
• automated tax collection;
• routine complaints and queries.
The Challenge
In many countries, central and local governments and other public bodies are focusing on open government, improving citizen access and enhancing the quality of the services provided, while retaining the strong traditional focus of government on cost-effectiveness. These new foci manifest themselves in various initiatives from central and local government and other public agencies. They include:
• provision of electronic access;
• improvement in citizen service provision and management;
• Ensuring that social exclusion does not occur when new initiatives are implemented, and that those in need of help or service actually receive it, rather than those who take most quickly to new channels of access.
The challenges this new direction poses to governments are:
• engaging the external environment after years of inward focus;
• determining what the current situation actually is, before formulating new initiatives;
• establishing the current level of citizen service provision, including the development of acceptable measures and measuring tools;
• identifying where the gaps exist in the service provision;
• Directing resources in the most cost effective/prioritized way to improve the service.
Meeting these challenges is made more complex by a number of other factors, including:
• increasing customer/citizen expectations, caused by the performance (and perhaps sometimes only the promise) of the private sector;
• the rising numbers of lobby and other pressure groups;
• increased confidence of customers in using the media to put pressure on government for better treatment;
• the need to use new channels of communication and distribution to reach customers who have had problems accessing government services through traditional channels, while ensuring that these new channels can work in an integrated manner with older channels;
• the need to observe the government's sometimes very tough general requirements affecting how customers are managed in either sector, eg data protection law;
• the need to manage new relationships with the private sector service providers who are involved in some way in this change, usually as agents.
Special Issues Affecting Public Sector Customers
A number of special issues affect the inter-sector translation of good practice. These include:
• The existence of differential/unequal information between providers and clients in service delivery, particularly where provider is more expert than customer/citizen can ever hope to be, either because of life-stage (education), knowledge (eg health), or because of costs of information access. Some examples are health, law and education. This often applies to the costs/difficulties of applying general information to specific cases.
• Many activities are associated with dealing with problem/extreme rather than average cases (law, welfare, education, health), and the aim of government is to prevent people needing the services, when they do need them to ensure that they get served quickly and efficiently, then to minimize the need for the service to be used again. Government bodies can focus heavily on prevention and lose sight of the fact that some people will not respond and then need support and help. If they over-generalize, people can fall through the net completely and form part of an underclass who are not serviced and are outcast.
• Externalities exist: that is, the act of providing/receiving service affects others than the recipient of the service. Road congestion is the obvious example, but the same applies to any queue for a scarce service. However, social interdependence in the act of service consumption therefore causes greater social benefits than private benefits to suppliers, and can cause much greater social costs to citizens than private costs to suppliers.
• There is concern about the influence of distribution of income and assets on ability of individuals to take up or benefit from services, so the 'value of the customer' is measured by other criteria than money, eg 'need', or 'social priority'. In some life stages money ceases to become the benefit it is in others, as it becomes impossible to buy the level of care that is required by the individual.
• Customers often cannot exit, so they need to be given voice (for example, through representation).
• There is also concern about the provision of access, choice and redress.
• Many governments see the role of the public sector as providing socially important interdependent, non-marketable services for social optimality, particularly where market tends to produce non-optimal results.
• Often there is a relationship of trust and agency between provider and client. The idea is that the citizen trusts a professional supplier to do what is right. However, this has been called into question, and the question applies to both correctness of service and quality of service.
• In many public sector operations (eg health services), the service is delivered by professionals, with their own interests and agenda.
• There is some tendency of the professional to mystify the customer so that the customer cannot independently judge the quality of service, particularly where the customer has no choice or right to data showing the quality of the service delivered.
• Many public sector organizations are considered by government as its agent in helping it meet its objectives for the citizen. However, the agency may develop its own set of objectives that conflict with the government's. In other cases, the provider is supposed to be the agent supposedly acting on behalf of the citizen, but again may develop objectives of its own.
• Quality of service is an issue, and particularly where there is no competition, independent bodies are needed to monitor quality. This leads to the question of who vets the vetters without the vetting becoming an onerous amount of red tape to the providers. There has to be room for trust in a system that is becoming heavily geared towards policing.
• Consultation as to what services should be delivered is often highly biased, with activists influencing the nature of service provision.
• Lack of proper research means that customers' needs and experiences are rarely properly understood.
• The process by which the public sector allocates its benefits is often by rationing and queues as a substitute for the price mechanism, rather than by some socially optimal selection process.
• In cases where central government provides resources and frameworks and local agencies deliver, there is a process break between who does the analysis and planning, and then decision making, and who implements, or delivers. This can lead to delivery failure.
The list may go on beyond any limit but one thing which we can act now to make that little difference to people of your country is to get into Citizen Experience Optimization program not necessarily to invest in HiFi technology but to take little step towards understanding their immediate needs and enable the technology to help you Serve Better….Yes We Can
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