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Local government

Effective service quality management in the public sector brings benefits to both customers and service providers. Customers receive better service - whilst the service providers benefit from increased loyalty and advocacy, and more effectively managed service costs. Unhappy customers cost more to serve!

Effective service quality management in the public sector brings benefits to customers and service providers

About our clients

- Client overview

Industry Perspectives

- Local Government

- Financial Services

- Telecommunications

- Retail & franchises

The responsibilities for local government continue to grow and become more sophisticated and customers make contact with their local council when they have questions and problems involving:

Animal welfare
Beaches
Building consents
Inspection services
Car parking
Dog licenses
Environmental protection

Libraries
Noise-control
Parks
Roads
Sports facilities
Storm and wastewater
Water supply

With thousands of service requests received each month, the challenge for local councils is to ensure that the many processes for capturing, responding and actioning these requests are effectively managed to produce a satisfactory outcome for both customer and council. Two attributes of local council services make this challenge all the more demanding:

Firstly, the sheer range and complexity of issues that come under their responsibility.
Secondly, the rising trend to outsource service delivery is making the management of the end-to-end process more complex, placing responsibility for managing service quality outside the council and into the hands of commercially-driven organisations.

Client results

CTMA has helped local councils improve service and reduce costs.
(Client examples below):

Service requests:

• Customer satisfaction improved by 10%

• Customer advocacy and support improved by 8%

• Call centre service request call-handling demand was reduced
by 13%

• Prematurely-closed service requests was reduced by 30%

Building consents:

• Customer satisfaction at participating councils improved at nearly twice the rate of other councils

Despite such a wide range of services (and each often supported by diverse teams of internal staff and external contractors) many councils only receive a single, annual, department-level assessment of customer satisfaction. To place more control in the hands of the council, CTMA has been working with a number of local authorities to build structured customer feedback into their service quality improvement programmes. This has helped them to reduce wasted costs, identify service failures and improve the effectiveness of their internally and externally resourced service delivery processes.

Satisfaction tracking:

Since 2002 CTMA has been working with individual councils to develop cost-effective management tools that provide an ongoing external measurement of service effectiveness. These satisfaction tracking tools help to monitor and support the ongoing management and service quality improvement of specific customer processes such as service requests and building consents.

CTMA's satisfaction tracking programmes help individual councils build cost-effective and customer-driven service standards and monitor the effective completion of internal processes and outsourced tasks.

National customer experience baseline:

CTMA's customer experience baseline study of Building Consent and Inspection Services has demonstrated how effective service can be directly linked to the industry's support for building regulations and a region's potential for growth.

The annual study helps participating councils identify opportunities for improvement within their own organisations and make service improvement investments that yield the most benefit to their customers. It helps to identify where limited resources might be reallocated to address issues that have greater impact on strategic outcomes.

Local government

Satisfaction tracking:

National customer experience baseline:

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