Can customer driven services place the customer centre-stage of our services? This is our Strategic Solution consultancy report to help you put the customer at the heart of public services.
A well-known car manufacturer once ran an advertising campaign with the slogan: “Everything we do is driven by you.”
It was a clever way to capture two ideas:
- Our products and services are yours to experience and value.
- Our thinking and ideas, what we might do next, are driven by your needs and aspirations
Customer Driven Services: Putting the Customer at the Heart of public Services
Customer driven services places the customer centre-stage in our services.
How can customers be put at the heart of public service delivery? Difficult circumstances are of course a challenge but they can also be an opportunity to think differently. Where better to start than thinking differently about what it means to be a customer of public services?
“It is not that public services need to be more like commercial service providers. It is that all service organisations need to find new ways of connecting intimately with their users and customers, of listening and responding in ways that reassure us all that we are being understood.”
(Journey to the interface: how public service design can connect users to reform. Parker and Heapy Demos, 2006)
Emphasis on the customer is a central theme of public service reform, and crucial areas to explore include:
- Beginnings: service for, not to the customer.
- The delivery paradox.
- Public sector customers, clients or citizens?
- Using the language of the customer.
- Making it personal.
- Customers in public services – issues and emerging approaches.
- Competitive, collaborative or customer advantage?
- Progress: services done with and by the customer.
- What is customer service? Start with the customer.
- From customer service to customer driven services.
- A virtuous circle of engagement.