Industry Perspectives:

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!

A major challenge for local government is the sheer range and complexity of issues that come under their responsibility.  Customers will contact them when they have questions and problems involving:

Despite such a wide range of services (and each supported by diverse teams of internal staff and external contractors) many councils only receive a single, annual, department-level assessment of customer satisfaction.

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.