Customer service strategies

"Strategies for delivering customer-facing services (usually covering access strategies around customer location, disability, channel preference etc)"

 A customer service strategy (including a customer access strategy) is crucial for ensuring that services are delivered efficiently and effectively to customers. Many councils make the mistake of thinking that they understand their customers' needs, but they rarely do unless they have specifically researched how their customers feel about the council and its services. Councils often make the mistake of asking the wrong questions, or asking closed questions ("would you prefer face-to-face, telephone or web contact with the Council?") rather than open ("in what ways could the Council improve how it offers its services?").

In thinking about customer service and access strategies, account has to be taken of people with particular needs - people with difficulties of transport, who live in particularly rural areas, have problems of mobility, are partially sighted, have hearing impairment, or have other disability - as well as those who simply have particular preferences or requirements.

The strategy also needs to make reasonable and explicit assumptions about the trajectory of customer services. Demand for local services is not static: changing demographics and technologies will impact on what services are required and how they are accessed and delivered. It's fair to assume, for example, that customers will expect more personalisation of services but at the same time will be more technically aware and have ever more sophisticated mobile and home communication devices.

Performance management needs to be built into the strategy. Targets both for quality and cost per transaction must be defined and monitored. This requires baseline calculations and ongoing benchmarking against peer authorities, and is essential in deciding whether or not to outsource or bring back in house.

Information management targets also need to be made explicit. Serving customers better and more cheaply means having accurate, well-structured and securely-held information about them. The strategy must record what information is currently held, what information should be held, and the steps planned to close the gap.

Self-service is the key to cost reduction, and to customer satisfaction. The more customers can do for themselves, the less it costs you to serve them and – often - the happier they will be with the results. Your website and related systems such as CRM and CMS may need complete reworking to enable this.

Of course some customers will have no access to the internet or will lack the skills to use it and this will limit the potential for self-service and the associated savings. Unless it is already being tackled, addressing the digital divide may need to be incorporated into the strategy.

The Council of the Future will commission more and deliver less itself. For every aspect of customer service, the question needs to be "why do this in house". Alternatives can produce better quality and cheaper services, provided your organisation has the flexibility to implement alternative resourcing options and has the necessary information base. The challenge is to maintain a consistent information base when different services may be sourced in different ways, and to commission services in such a way that providers are kept up to the mark and encouraged to be innovative, but can also be rapidly replaced should they fail to deliver. The underlying point is that information is the organisation’s key asset.

Partnership working needs to be a central element of the strategy. Service delivery increasingly demands inter-working with other local authorities and agencies, sharing service delivery (or external supplier contracts) and overheads. The strategy must focus attention on which partnerships are required and how they are to be managed.

Finally, ongoing review of the strategy and the organisation’s performance against it need to be built in and feedback loops incorporated.