Understanding customer needs

"Knowing who the Council’s customers are, and what their needs are, using well-thought-out customer surveys; listening to what customers have to say"

Many councils claim to have an understanding of their customers' needs, but have never actually asked them! The first step, of course is to be clear about who the customers are - most councils will have three distinct groups - citizens and families who live in the area, businesses based in the area, and tourists or visitors to the area. These can of course be broken down further according to their needs - and tools such as Mosaic can help to break down populations on a geographic basis to identify areas and communities of greatest need.

The next step is to listen to what your customers have to say - not by giving them questionnaires in which your own options are presented as a closed set of questions (eg "when communicating with the council would you prefer to (a) visit the council offices, (b) phone the council, (c) e-mail the council or (d) use the internet.) which reflect how the council thinks about things, rather than how the customer sees them. Councils which conclude that telephone is the preferred means of contact usually fail to realise that it may simply be the least bad of the options available at that time (ie because the website is poorly designed, and the council offices are difficult to reach) - and so they invest in telephone contact centres at the expense of other options, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. But it still fails to deliver what the customers really want.

Finding out what your customers want is not easy, but there are well-established means of doing so - using a combination of survey tools which present open questions ("how could the process of applying for benefits be made easier from your point of view?") and which focus on the outcomes that a customer can relate to. Getting the benefits they're entitled to is the key interest of some customers, and whether they use phone, e-mail, the internet or texting to do it, is really irrelevant to them - so long as it's easy and it works.

Councils have invested heavily in creating contact centres - usually in isolation from other public, independent and voluntary sector bodies. Contact centres are slightly more efficient than what existed previously, but are a long way short of the efficiencies that are possible through self-serve on the web, and through joint working with other agencies. A single contact centre, serving the council(s) in the area, non-emergency calls to police, fire and rescue, health services, job centres, and other bodies working to deliver services locally is the ultimate goal, and is the only one that is sustainable.