The Same or Different?

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