Devil's Advocate: Does our government want us to burst a blood vessel?

We've heard plenty of stories about call centre rage so maybe columnist Martin Brampton is right to this week question the government's interpretation of CRM...

Last week, I was wondering how to spend the government's multi-billion pound IT budget. Some claim customer relationship management (CRM) is an important candidate for public sector spending. CRM, it is said, is key to the success of e-government. Could this be true?

An immediate puzzle is to disentangle exactly what is meant by CRM. We get a clue when we hear suggestions such as "low cost, easy to install CRM for local government". This sounds depressingly like software, albeit relatively cheap software. But CRM surely isn't a kind of software, is it?

What is lacking from this dialogue is any discussion of the classic questions to do with the customer relationship. When CRM first became a focus of attention a few years ago, I was persuaded that there was significant new thinking behind the change. New questions were being asked that could change the shape of organisations.

Familiar production processes had pushed businesses into highly product-oriented thought patterns. Obviously, when the products were to be sold, effort went into relating to potential customers. After the product had been sold, many organisations ran service operations to provide support. The analysis was always product-oriented, though. A business plan consisted of a set of products, with sales forecasts for each and calculations on the cost of production, cost of sales and so on.

To break the pattern, innovators started to ask questions. Who are our customers? What do our customers want to obtain from us? How can we best serve them? What can we best serve to them? These questions, and others like them, provided a different way to look at the organisation.

Innovative thought is hard work, so all too many organisations simply adopted the language without applying the philosophy. Software vendors rushed to take advantage of a new market, that of providing packaged CRM technology. Instead of changing the fundamental approach of an organisation, CRM became just another step in the process of automation. It often meant little more than the introduction of a call centre.

Here, questions of how best to serve customers have usually been forgotten. Instead, the goal became reducing the cost of customer interactions to the minimum tolerable level or less. Through the use of 0870 phone numbers, it was even possible to derive revenue from the hapless customers, trapped waiting to speak to the call centre operator.

Worse still, many organisations created call centres that obstructed customer service. Software provided the means to keep details of the customer request but processes did not exist to allow the issues to be effectively resolved. The operator was therefore able to recall the history of contacts and to agree with the customer that nothing effective had been done. This is a rather modest achievement.

Sadly it now seems as if the public sector is moving down this doleful path, just as some commercial organisations are realising the error of their ways. So long as a market is booming, customer service can be allowed to trail behind. As markets mature, it becomes clear that customer churn is a major cost and service starts to receive serious attention from top management.

Government runs the risk of giving us the worst of all worlds. While we might well think of the public sector as a 'mature market', there is little scope for customer churn in the absence of alternative providers. The stress on the mechanics of CRM as against the hard thinking that characterises truly innovative approaches to customers is doubly alarming.

Seeing the public sector as an unfortunate necessity, an overhead supported by the private sector, is the counterpart of this thinking. The reality is that the public sector provides services that, by and large, we want. Government necessarily provides some, others we as a society have chosen should be provided by government. Usually, there are sound reasons for these choices. Now if we clearly understood public provision, maybe we could figure out where technology could help. But I doubt that we do.