Government Realises They Have Customers!

In the 2005 drive for e-government efficiency, scant attention was paid to service quality, by public organizations with little innate marketing knowledge. Only when the deadline passed was the searchlight turned on the customer’ and employee inventiveness set loose with CRM techniques borrowed from the private sector.

“We have to accept that having ALL government services online by 2005 is not as good as having BETTER services online.  The only reason we should be doing any of this is if we can deliver better services.“ - Dr Ian Kearns, Head of the Digital Society Programme at the Institute for Public Policy Research (2002)

From Gershon to Varney

In 2005 a report I wrote on the public sector and concluded that

” despite assurances that the modernisation drive, currently focused through the Gershon Report, was to reallocate resources from back-office to front-office for service improvement, customers still seem to have a back seat - somewhere behind the back office”.

The advice to public sector then was to make eGovernment more effective by adopting new customer centric marketing techniques - rather than old mass market ones.  Looking at customer relationship management activity in the public sector this year, I believe things have indeed moved that way and changed for the better.

The focus for Government CRM initiatives is now the 2006 Varney report on service transformation.  But the real drive for improvement seems to be coming bottom up and particularly from non-central Government organizations like local authorities and the police.  At a recent conference the ‘man from the ministry’, sent to outline the plan, seemed distinctly behind the game.

” A target culture without a citizen’s perspective is intellectually and morally bankrupt.  Excellence in public services cannot be achieved by centrally driven targets and national league tables alone.” Julie Spence, Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire