Open Eye:Chat

'No idea your Worship'

And you worried that you may not understand your customer fully. Well, you may rest easy in your beds compared to colleagues thinking about developing a Citizen Focused approach in the courts and tribunals sector.

The Ministry of Justice published a report by Cardiff Law School, Cardiff University, last week, reviewing recent evidence and studies regarding the fundamental issue of what drives public and participant satisfaction with courts and tribunals. Report available here.

The report reviewed evidence from 2000 onwards, on what factors may be related to public and participant (non-professional users, witnesses and jurors) satisfaction with courts and tribunals.

The review reveals that there is a distinct scarcity of robust, well analysed data on what the general public thinks about civil and family courts and tribunals and what underlies those perceptions. Similarly, there is little data on what businesses think of courts and tribunals.

Not only is there a scarcity of data, what data is available on participants, outside of the criminal context in particular, also lacks depth.

Because the data is so weak, the report’s authors conclude that they ‘cannot say with authority whether the public, or indeed those who have participated in civil or family cases, are generally satisfied with those courts and tribunals, and why they are satisfied (or not)’.

Not surprisingly (you may come to the very same conclusion) they believe that ‘lack of such data about a key public institution is concerning’. No kidding Sherlock.

Trying their best to find some good news, the authors believe that the evidence that does  exists suggests that outcomes, and the perceived fairness of those outcomes; attitudes and contextual issues (such as attitudes to crime and the quality of the court environment and support); and participant judgments about the fairness of court or tribunal process all have an independent relationship with (and so may ‘drive’) public and participant satisfaction with courts and tribunals. The evidence on whether demographic characteristics have an independent influence is apparently more mixed.

On the whole, it seems as though it is participant judgments about the fairness of the process not the outcomes that participants receive which are most important in influencing the levels of their satisfaction.

Seems like a fine subject area to start bidding for a Fulbright study programme !

The Delivery Council gets busy.....delivering.

I have mentioned Sir David Varney in several posts on this site. Sir David, amongst his many other roles, is Chairman of the Delivery Council. The Delivery Council sits within the Cabinet Office and is responsible for co-ordinating cross-government activity to drive citizen and business centred services.

Well, the Delivery Council is now starting to produce some interesting and useful material. The latest offerings are:

• An introduction to customer journey mapping
• A pocket guide to service design principles
• A primer on customer insight in public services
• Establishing an Effective Customer Insight Capability in Public Sector Organisations
• Promoting Customer Satisfaction: Guidance on improving the customer experience in Public Services 
• How to measure customer satisfaction: A tool to improve the experience of customers

All of these really useful things can be found at the bottom of the page here

 

Moving to user defined service provision. The first steps...

An interesting publication came out from DCLG yesterday. The guidance to Local Authorities on the development of local charters was published (available here or in the downloads section of this site).

The development of local service charters, or ‘Community Contracts’ as Hazel Blears is calling them, underlines a number of this government's key reform strands and beliefs. The importance of localism, the pre-eminent role of the local authority in the co-ordination of local service delivery, the re-emergence of the importance of the role of councilor (‘Local councillors are democratic champions for their communities’) and the need for services to be agile and adaptive in order to meet increasingly segmented (fragmented?) community needs.

At present confined to a number of trial areas around the country, charters will be developed by the local authority in partnership with other service providers and the community, usually through a community level organisation such as a parish council, residents’ association, or other neighbourhood group.

The guidance is clear that ‘Strong local leadership from the council and the Local Strategic Partnership is essential to encourage agencies to engage directly with residents at the local level’.

The charters are seen as a key mechanism for local councilors to use the service commitments and priorities named in them, to hold services to account. This monitoring role can tie into existing scrutiny structures, local scrutiny or a Councillors’ Call for Action (see the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 for details of the Councillors' Call for Action).

The charters also signal another interesting development: Neighbourhood Area Agreements (NAA's). Apparently Birmingham’s Strategic Partnership has devolved elements of its Local Area Agreement to smaller areas. Community groups in three areas of the city have developed neighbourhood area agreements, taking responsibility for the delivery of activities which meet LAA targets and outcomes in their area.

These lead community groups will decide how services are commissioned locally. In some cases they will provide services themselves and in others they will negotiate with service providers locally and monitor their delivery. This approach is intended to ensure that solutions are tailored to the local area.

Actually, when you think about it, NAA’s makes sense and fit well into the context of Local Area Agreements and Multi Area Agreements. The scrutiny of that service provision also sits well within the developing performance framework (however uncomfortable that proves to be for existing organisational cultures). NAA's do provide an obvious anchor for local scrutiny and local delivery, they may well also prove to be the mechanism that finally also delivers the inescapable roots of the two tier policing service that is clearly emerging. 

The question is though, are BCU’s up to it? Are they currently sufficiently adaptable and flexible in the way that their services are designed and delivered to meet such a specific, multi segmented service at Neighbourhood level. Sure they have Neighbourhood Policing Teams and they will play a key role in the delivery of NAA's, but are the internal systems, organisational practices, marketing techniques and management mind set where they need to be in order to recognise and deliver such a bespoke, customer driven and user defined service? Do they have the techniques and processes that will allow them to identify those multi faceted calls on service and do they have the skill and expertise (particularly marketing expertise) to manage those community expectations. Time will tell.

It will certainly be interesting to see the results from the pilot areas and the learning that comes from them. My feeling though is that NAA’s, and everything that links into them, are a done deal and are going to be around for a long time to come.

Is FOSSing good for you?

Scanning around I see that the second annual Front Office Shared Services (FOSS) national conference is taking place in London on 7th and 8th May next year.

The event caught my eye because it references a significant number of current key themes from CSR07 and the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act (the enabling legislation for the DCLG Strong and Prosperous Communities agenda), such as citizen involvement in service design, customer insight, partnership approaches to asset management, efficiency and Third Sector involvement in local service delivery.

If that by itself wasn't enough to drive you wild with excitement, a keynote speaker is Sir David Varney, the  Prime Minister’s Advisor on Service Transformation, Chair of the cross government Delivery Council and author of 'A better deal for businesses and citizens, a better deal for the taxpayer' (the report commissioned by Gordon Brown when he was at the Treasury).

The event is apparently specifically designed to showcase excellent practice where local public sector organisations are working together to commission and deliver more effective and efficient services for citizens and businesses, and will apparently move away from the traditional talking head and workshop structure in order to promote more creative solutions for networking, showcasing and knowledge sharing.

So. Seems like an interesting event. Details here.

Finger on the trigger

There is an interesting and thought provoking article on environmental triggers over at Fast Company by the brothers Dan and Chip Heath (the best-selling authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die) which has got me thinking about Citizen Focus and the ways that triggers could be used to help stimulate colleagues actions.

Here is an edited (by me) version of the article….

‘What’s an environmental trigger? Well, when you're afraid of forgetting a folder that you need for work the next day, you may leave it right by the front door. You've created an environmental trigger.

This idea of using triggers extends far beyond your front door--into many aspects of our society, including business triggers for personal productivity such as ‘To Do’ lists. Basically, if you have something you don't want to forget, don't scrunch up your brain and try really hard to retain it; just install an environmental trigger to do the remembering for you.

What if people planned their ideas, from the start, to take advantage of triggers in the environment? Two professors, Jonah A. Berger and Grainne Fitzsimons, announce in a forthcoming paper that they've used triggers to do the impossible: get college students to eat more veggies.

In their study, students were paid $20 to report their daily eating habits. Then they were offered a seemingly unrelated opportunity to give feedback on a public-health slogan. One group of students saw the slogan "Live the healthy way, eat five fruits and veggies a day." Another group saw "Each and every dining-hall tray needs five fruits and veggies a day." In both cases, the idea is the same--eat more fruits and veggies--but the slogan with the tray hooks into a specific cue in the environment.

The students didn't much like the tray slogan. They found it corny and rated it half as attractive as the more generic slogan. Meanwhile, the professors were keeping an eye on what the students ate. Those who got the generic "Live healthy" slogan, without the trigger, didn’t eat any more fruits and vegetables. The same goes for those who got the tray slogan but ate in cafeterias without trays. But students who ate in cafeterias with trays ate 25% more fruits and veggies over the course of the next week. The trigger worked.

Marketers spend most of their time scheming how to drive messages into the heads of consumers, and yet rarely do they use triggers. A slogan by itself is a funny kind of trigger, because the only time it appears is when you're exposed to the advertisements it's featured in.

Think about the ideas that are important to you: Could you hook them to something in the environment? An anti-nuclear-testing group, for instance, quietly placed signs around the walk buttons at urban crosswalks, and as a pedestrian's finger moved toward the button, he'd notice that the sign read the world could end this easily. Suddenly, people would flinch, and think about nuclear weapons when crossing the street.

Whether you're running a multinational or just reminding yourself to pick up milk, try planting some idea triggers in your environment’.

One of the problems of Citizen Focus is that it's a concept and like most concepts it needs to be kept at the forefront of people’s minds. So, if management exhortation by email and poster aren’t doing it for you, what Citizen Focus environmental triggers could you devise and use where you are….? Do let me know.

5 ways to help the customer 'buy' your service

I have been reading the new(ish) book on 'Marketing in the Public Sector: a roadmap for improved performance' by Kottler and Lee (a good read and well worth considering for the bookshelf, although a lot of American examples are used).

In the book, amongst many other things, they examine the stages of activity that mark out a decision to 'buy' something, and this has led me to start thinking about the ways in which customers and colleagues 'buy' our divisional, departmental or unit product or service offering.

K&L talk about the 'buyer decision process' as a linear process that encompasses clear and separate stages of needs recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision and post purchase behaviour.

In citizen focus terms it seems to me that there is considerable mileage in looking at your dept, unit etc through the eyes of the customer and considering (needs recognition) :

1.  How can I help my target audience (internal or external) understand or recognise the need to use (or buy) my product or service (needs recognition) and what range of information products or presentational styles could I use (information presentation and relevance) to assist them in reaching that understanding?

2. How can I make it easy for the customer to find the information that they want about my product or service (information search)?

3. How can I present my information, across a range of channels, in a manner that allows them to make an informed choice about my product or service (evaluation of alternatives)?

4. How can I make my product or service accessible to them and assist them to access it, in a way that suits them, when they are ready to 'buy' (purchase decision)? 

5. What mechanisms or processes can I build into my service offering in order to stay in touch with my customer, to evaluate their satisfaction, to build permission to engage with them again in order to offer new services and to work towards them becoming advocates for my product and ambassadors for my brand (post purchase behaviour).    

List five things...

You presumably read this blog because you are interested in the government reform agenda and in providing a better, more customer focused, service.

So, here's a thought. What are you personally doing today that is more customer focused, more customer centric than what you were doing three months ago (or six months ago)?

 List five things now. It should be easy.

Can't manage five? Try three.

Can't manage three?

Maybe it's time to seriously rethink what you do and why you do it.

Perception: The police have become a faceless mask

Just out from the Ministry of Justice is a research report entitled ‘Confidence in the criminal justice system: What lies beneath?’ by Dominic Smith

As we move into an era where perception and confidence will become increasingly important performance metrics, the 26 page report makes interesting reading.

The report suggests that it’s findings ‘provide evidence of potentially useful directions for policy development and performance measurement in this area’.

Specifically it finds that the term ‘criminal justice system’ (CJS) leads most people to think of the police and/or the courts (Only four per cent of people were able to identify five CJS agencies). Therefore, activities to improve public confidence in the CJS should focus on the police and courts. It also concludes that public information concerning the CJS should focus on the key areas of sentencing, improvements in services to victims, and citizen-focused policing.

Raising public confidence in the criminal justice system (CJS) is one of the Government’s key Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets. The level of public confidence in the CJS is currently measured by responses given to the seven confidence questions contained within the British Crime Survey (BCS). The BCS survey covers approximately 47,000 interviewees aged 16 and over.

The proportion of people in the survey who identified each of the main criminal justice agencies were:

Police      74%

Courts      64%

CPS        24%

Prisons     17%

Probation 15%

Other       19%

Although there are seven confidence questions in the BCS, the main measure is based on the question: ‘How confident are you that the criminal justice system is effective in bringing people who commit crimes to justice?’ Answer: 39 per cent  (year ending March 2003) has risen to 44% (year ending March 2006)

‘Consistency of sentences passed’, ‘criminal justice agency (CJA) contact with victims and witnesses’, ‘whether the offender is caught’ and ‘police visibility’ were identified as the main factors people thought about when assessing their level of confidence in the CJS.

With regard to ‘CJA contact with victims and witnesses’. The frequency of contact people had with these agencies (mainly the police and the courts) was seen as a key factor in their level of confidence. However, the majority of focus group participants who had some experience of dealing with the police or the courts said they had received a low level of contact, which had made them feel abandoned by the CJS.

Can there be anyone left in the police service who isn’t aware of the issue regarding people's lower levels of satisfaction after actually experiencing our service? This is an issue of huge significance, yet it seems the lessons simply aren’t being learnt.

‘Police visibility’ was also an issue, with people in the 45 and over age group generally of the opinion that the number of police officers seen on the streets was less compared to twenty years ago. They saw ‘more police on the streets’ as a factor which would improve their level of confidence. They weren’t alone. Over four fifths of BCS respondents felt that seeing more police officers on foot patrol would make them feel safer.

People commented that the only time that the police appeared was after an incident had taken place. One person used the phrase: “the police have become a faceless mask”, to illustrate how they were less able to identify with police officers locally and the perception that they were being removed from the streets to undertake more bureaucratic tasks such as form filling.

The full research report can be found in the downloads section.

The CEO Mayor (or Local Authority Chief Exec !)

As we move into an era in the UK where Local Authority Chief Execs and Mayors start to exert their influence, direct service provision and actively engage in ‘place shaping’, the following article (reproduced and edited from Business Week Magazine) provides an interesting insight into what that (potentially) entrepreneurial role might look like and encompass.  

New York's Mayor Mike Bloomberg, is creating a new model for public service that places pragmatism before politics. Bloomberg, a forthright 65-year-old billionaire, just may have the right combination of managerial, risk-taking, and political skills to create a new model for public service.

Applying lessons from an early career on Wall Street and from two decades building his financial-information and media empire, the mayor is using technology, marketing, data analysis, and results-driven incentives to manage what is often seen as an unmanageable city of 8 million.

Bloomberg sees New York City as a corporation, its citizens as customers, its sanitation workers, police officers, clerks, and deputy commissioners as talent. He is the chief executive.

His checklist-obsessed operating style has resonated with New York's famously cynical citizenry (70% approval ratings). "People see that this can be done in a place like New York, effectively managing something so large and complex, and they think, 'Hey, this can be done elsewhere.'"

The city is a brand

On 1 Jan 2002, the day he was sworn in as New York's 108th mayor, the city was grappling with the psychological and financial impact of the terrorist attacks. It faced a budget gap of nearly $6 billion. Bloomberg had three options: cut services, raise taxes, or both. He did what no mayor had dared to do in more than a decade: He increased property taxes. Where most politicians would have seen only a fiscal solution to the budget gap, he spotted a marketing opportunity. He was protecting the New York City "brand."

Bloomberg saw a low crime rate, good public transportation, and clean streets as indispensable to selling New York. Cutting back on services, he felt, would send the wrong message to the business community and the outside world.

At the same time, Bloomberg boosted New York's promotional efforts. First, he consolidated three existing operations under a not-for-profit entity called NYC & Co. He tripled the city's contribution to the annual marketing budget, to $22 million. Then he went out and hired as CEO a veteran ad man, George Fertitta, whose branding and marketing firm had handled the likes of Coca-Cola and Walt Disney. All cities have marketing arms, but this operation is essentially an advertising agency with an in-house creative services unit that uses various media, from bus shelters to the city's cable channel, to help sell the Big Apple.

Bloomberg set a goal for NYC & Co: lure 50 million visitors a year by 2015. And knowing that foreign tourists spend three times as much as U.S. visitors, he ordered Fertitta to open more branch offices around the world. Today, NYC & Co. has a presence in 14 cities, with new offices set to open in Seoul, Tokyo, and Shanghai in coming months.

Since 2003, New York says it has added 151,100 new private sector jobs, boosting the economy and fueling a construction boom. And last year, partly owing to a weak U.S. dollar, the city reports attracting 44 million visitors, up from 35 million in 2002.

The voters are customers

Bloomberg the executive was obsessive about catering to his customers, establishing 24-hour call lines, collecting data to help develop new products, and sending his executives out into the field to solicit feedback directly from clients. "Good companies listen to their customers, No. 1," he says. "Then they try to satisfy their needs, No. 2. But don't let them drive the internal decisions of the company."

Bloomberg decided New York needed its own 24-hour customer-service line. Yes, other cities had deployed 311 numbers, but never on such a grand scale. The benefit, beyond giving the public a new outlet to vent, would be making city government more efficient.

One month after being sworn in, Bloomberg proposed a 311 line that would allow New Yorkers to report everything from noise pollution to downed power lines. More important, 311 would give the mayor unprecedented access to what was on his constituents' minds. Bloomberg sees the weekly reports and gets a sense of the citizenry's angst—and whether problems are getting solved and how quickly.

Since it launched in March, 2003, at a startup cost of $25 million, 311 has received 49 million calls. The service employs 370 round-the-clock call takers. And New York has done an impressive job of data-mining the calls and quickly responding, says Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis and now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Something special is going on in New York," he says. As far as the mayor is concerned, the numbers tell the story. Emergency 911 traffic is down by 1 million calls since 311's inception, meaning first responders are being called to fewer non-emergencies. The Buildings Dept. uses 311 to streamline the permit process and the review of plans by inspectors. The average wait time for an appointment with a building inspector has dropped from 40 days to less than a week. Two years after 311 launched, inspections for excessive noise were up 94%; rodent exterminations, 36%.

Heather Schwartz is a regular user of the 311 line and says she became a big fan last year when she called about graffiti in a northern Manhattan subway station. Within days, the walls were painted over. Each time the graffiti artists returned, the city would paint over their handiwork. Finally the vandals gave up. Now Schwartz calls 311 for everything from elevator inspections to trash in the streets. "I am thrilled with it," she says. "It professionalizes the city."

The more light, the better

Earlier this year, during a morning meeting with top staffers, Bloomberg noticed the large doors to the ornate conference room in City Hall. They were wooden. How could that be? Bloomberg thought he'd made City Hall "see-through." All meeting rooms had glass windows, so you could look inside. His desk and those of his staff were clustered in a room without walls to facilitate better and faster communication. By week's end the room had glass doors.

Citizens can also get a closer look at their city government than ever before. The mayor's management report once exceeded 1,000 pages in three printed volumes. Today, the report, which reviews the delivery of city services, is 186 pages, available online, and includes many more features than before, including neighborhood data and five-year trends that allow New Yorkers to compare past and present. The city plans and budget are also now fully accessible on the city's Web site.

Hire smart and delegate

Bloomberg has also recruited his lieutenants based on their ability to set targets and hit them. Not surprisingly, he reached into the business community, appointing a former partner of a private equity firm to run New York City's economic development office. And he brought in Katherine Oliver to run the city's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting.

Oliver was working in London, overseeing Bloomberg global radio and television operations, when she got the call. Her orders from the mayor were simple: build a customer-service organization. She wasn't prepared for how much the film office needed modernizing and refocusing. Production companies were required to visit the office and fill out permit applications on paper and to Oliver's astonishment the agency had only one computer. Most staff were tapping away on electric typewriters.

Within a month of her arrival, her 22 employees had new Dell flat-screens, and production companies were able to file for permits online. Approvals have since surged to 200 a day, up from 200 a week in 2002. Oliver also put a photo library on the Web site, letting producers scout locations from their desks. Oliver says the program has generated $2.4 billion in new business and 10,000 new jobs since 2005. She offered filmmakers free advertising space on public property. And she set up a dedicated team of 33 police officers to ease shoots in the city. "We tried to look at this as business to business," says Oliver. "This is a microcosm of what Michael wanted to do for the entire city."

Be bold, be fearless

"A major part of the CEO's responsibilities is to be the ultimate risk-taker and decision-maker. Truman ('The buck stops here') had it right." So wrote Bloomberg in his 1997 autobiography Bloomberg By Bloomberg. The mayor has embraced risk with an almost reckless disregard for political repercussions.

"In business, you reward people for taking risks. When it doesn't work out, you promote them because they were willing to try new things. If people come back and tell me they skied all day and never fell down, I tell them to try a different mountain." Says Bloomberg. He adds: "I have always joked that the difference between having the courage of your convictions and being pigheaded is in the results."

What has Bloomberg learned as mayor? "The real world, whether in business or government, requires that you don't jump to the endgame or to success right away," he says. "You do it piece by piece. Some people get immobilized when they come to a roadblock. My answer is, 'you know, it's a shame it's there, but now where else can we go? Let's just do it.'"

Brand, customers, marketing, rapid change.....interesting. Sounds like he's been on a Strategic Citizen Focus Course !

Satisfied customer or town cryer ?

All English local authorities are required by statute to undertake Best Value User Satisfaction Surveys on a three-yearly basis to collect data for Best Value Performance satisfaction indicators. The fi­rst round of these surveys ran in 2000-01, the second in 2003-04 and the report issued by DCLG this week publishes national results from the third round in 2006-07. The report publishes an initial set of results from the General Household Survey using nationally aggregated BVPI results and using data from 387 English local authorities.

And guess what? We are becoming more demanding customers.

Average overall satisfaction with local authorities has fallen by one percentage point, from 55% satisfi­ed in 2003-04 to 54% in 2006-07. This represents an 11 percentage point decline on 2000-01 levels

As you would expect there are variations. Overall satisfaction varies by age, gender, ethnicity, and stated disability. Older age groups are more likely to express satisfaction with their local authority than younger age groups, and women are more likely to express satisfaction than men. Variation by ethnicity is more complex: respondents identifying themselves as Black are slightly more likely to be satisfi­ed than the average, and those identifying themselves as Mixed, Asian or other non-White ethnicities are slightly less likely to be satis­fied than the average.

Having recently blogged about the Home Office publication on improving policing summaries, it was interesting to see in this report that nationally, only 47% of residents feel their council keeps residents very or fairly well informed about the services and benefi­ts it provides, which represents a decline of 9 percentage points from 2003-04.  And, surprise, surprise, people who feel more informed, tend to be more satisfi­ed with their council overall.

The lessons to be learnt from this survey?. Customers are getting more demanding. Expectations are increasing. Satisfaction is dropping and people don’t feel that they are being communicated with.

IDeA recently published a document (‘Developing the new performance framework for localities’ available in the downloads section) which states that ‘'The high-performing council of the future will be one that has a well developed insight into its customers, understands the differences between key customer segments and shares this information with other public service providers to get a rounded view of people in the local area'.

Shouldn’t that read ‘The high performing BCU of the future’ and be the performance and delivery mantra of every BCU !

We really aren’t that different from our local authority colleagues and we can certainly learn from their customers responses to them.