The financial imperatives
Local government: Improve service and reduce costs
Paul Linnell
In the public sector it can sometimes be quite a challenge
to be calculate cost-justification for service improvement. But
one of our local government clients has recently shown just
one of the ways that customer satisfaction can be a
financial benefit in the public sector - as well as making
good sense for business.
Through their customer experience measurement programme they
have been getting an ongoing measure of service performance
that helps them identify service failures and monitor the
performance of their internally and externally resourced
service delivery processes.
The real win for this local council was that before they
were routinely closing the loop with their customers,
various process and system failures, and (dare I suggest)
human factors, were contributing to delays and (in
some cases) to the non-actioning of customer service
requests.
Many of these response delays were leading to customers
needing to call back and repeat or escalate their requests.
By identifying the specific request types, processes,
systems, departments, service crews or contractors that were
involved in each service failure, the programme has helped
the council reduce their service request call-handling
demand in their call centre by a full 13%.
In performance terms their work to improve their services
has helped them reduce prematurely-closed service requests
by 30% and increase their customer satisfaction by 10%.
Hats of to their team - great savings for the council and a
fantastic example of turning customer experience measurement
into management actions!
