I happened
to be in Istanbul during the recent protest events which raised an interesting
service quality question.
Are there
any parallels to be drawn or transferable skills to be learned from comparing
Citizen Service provided by governments and Customer Service provided by
private sector organisations?
It is not a
simple question, especially in this case where a government was elected
democratically with a very clear majority and as in most democracies was voted
into power on the back of a manifesto which outlines their “proposition” to
their customers, the citizens. So does
that power create responsibility to honour the specific detail of the proposition
or does it create the freedom for the government to deliver services in a way
that it interprets as best to suits any given situation?
A commercial
organisation makes “propositions” to its customers who are able to test the
organisation’s ability to deliver on such promises by becoming customers and
acquiring the proposed goods and services in exchange for payment, usually in
the form of money. If the company fails to deliver its customers have the
ability to complain or “protest” and if the protest is unsuccessful then
customers can, (unless it is a monopoly) take their custom and their money away
from that organisation and go to a competitor. A company which fails to listen to such
protests from a significant proportion of its customers is usually on its way
to limited growth at best and failure at worst. Also in the commercial world it
is highly unusual for customers to protest as a group, except perhaps in the
legal arena of class actions.
In the case
of governments, the case is different. Government is by its very nature a
monopoly, if a government fails to deliver on its proposition, or embarks on a
course of action which was not in its manifesto and is not expected by its
citizen customers, then its citizens can complain (and can in some cases even
take the government to court, but not everywhere). If the complaints are
unheeded, or deliberately ignored then citizen customers can and do join
together to complain/protest.
The first
rule of managing customer service, (or indeed managing any form of criticism,)
is to ask the question “Are they right?”, and of so in which area or
combination of areas of service quality management has the failure occurred. Is
it Policy, Product/Service, Processes, Premises/Environment or People that have
led to the failure? Most professional, successful commercial organisations do
listen, do analyse the complaints/ protests and recognise the huge value of
using that data as a tool to drive improvement.
In the case
of a government there is, at one level, no commercial imperative to either listen or
to act in accordance with the perceptions of its citizen customers, there is no
need in fact to do anything at all and no sanction for such inertia other than
the ballot box at the next election. Governments of all shapes and persuasions can
be very good at ignoring their citizen customers. However because a citizen
customer has been ignored does it not follow that they have given up and
forgotten the issue? If citizen customers, in an attempt to assuage their
frustration, choose to come together to complain in the hope that a group of
voices will have a better chance of being heard then that is in most
democracies, including Turkey, their right. On another level there is a huge
commercial imperative if foreign investment, tourism and other international
revenue sources are involved and the way a government manages citizen customer
complaints may well influence how those investment/revenue customers perceive
and react to the situation.
Is the way a
government responds, either by listening and engaging in dialogue to
explain/negotiate their point of view or by another, perhaps heavier handed,
approach a measure of how they see their
duty of service delivery to any
significant group of citizens? In the
case of Turkey, it appears that any failure on the part of the government is
not Product, Process, Premises or even People related it appears more to be a
function of Policy failure. The policy supporting the government re-action to
the initial complaint was not expected by the citizen customers and appears to
have taken them by surprise (and it is well known in service quality management
that people can take good news and bad news but they do not like surprises).
In the
commercial world research indicates that, failure to resolve a policy issue
between organisation and customers results in permanent, unrecoverable loss of
the customer. Perhaps that is why so much angst and frustration is generated by
such issues.
So in
answering the question :
Are there any parallels to be drawn
or transferable skills to be learned from
comparing Citizen Service provided by governments and Customer Service provided
by private sector organisations?
In the
commercial world there are a number of data sources available to inform the
scope of service delivery policy, e.g. nature of the complaint, deviation from
the customer proposition, volume of complaints, impact on revenue, indication
of a pending paradigm shift or a deeper area of dissatisfaction, complaints
coming from the key target market - all of which can be tested against a robust
management model. Is the stumbling block for governments the way in which the
monopoly position bestowed upon them by a major electoral majority creates a
situation where, like it or not , all citizen customers are their target market
so if relationships are not managed carefully in any key sector then polarised confrontation could become a
potential outcome?
What can governments
learn from the commercial world? Perhaps
anticipating, listening and responding to complaints in a way which recognises
the gap between the citizen customers’ expectations of their proposition and
its delivery might be a good start. Could
establishing an early dialogue, which is a key part of effective customer
complaint management, to attenuate the potential for confrontation be helpful? Would a published complaint resolution
process be useful?
Many of the
more enlightened governments already recognise the concept of citizen service
and it is an interesting observation that those leading this field have the continuous
development and improvement of citizen service quality high on their policy agendas.
That is a function of clear leadership
and as the most powerful and effective form of leadership is conditional upon
the identification of a mutually acceptable destination for all involved perhaps
that is a lesson for both sides if disagreement descends into confrontation.
What can a
commercial organisation learn from a government response, such as the one in
Istanbul?
Probably
that driving a policy agenda through regardless of customer reaction is a risky
strategy with a high potential for customer dissatisfaction and defection. Also
that water cannon and tear gas may not the best customer relationship
management tools – companies could try them but they are risky and unlikely to
build high levels of trust and loyalty – but this should not be mentioned
outside this blog in case the international banks adopt it as an exciting new
tactic!!
All members
of almost every population are both customers and citizens
so should they expect to be treated differently depending upon who is
delivering the service?
Philip Forrest
