Quocirca's Straight Talking: Why is customer service so hard?

Communication with customers is so basic - why have efforts to automate it gone so wrong? Quocirca's Elaine Axby compares the challenges faced in this area by both the public and private sectors.

A briefing with a supplier of specialist call centre software the other week gave rise to an interesting complaint about what organisations want from CRM (customer relationship management). The supplier in question bemoaned the lack of imagination on the part of their customers: "We can do all sorts of interesting things, but all we ever get asked to do is shave parts of a second off each call."

This I think encapsulates many of the traditional problems with CRM, on the part of both the suppliers and their customers. It's all about shaving costs, not offering service. It's about making things convenient (and cheaper) for the organisation but not adding value for the user.

However, lessons are being learnt and products developed that allow organisations to interface their front-office operations with different sets of back-end systems, and offer a more seamless service to the customer.

My experience bears this out - although calling my bank and wanting to talk firstly about my personal account and then my business account involves a tedious transfer between different bits of the organisation, the right information on my account does come up on the second operator's screen (if the systems are working, but that's another story...).

Would it be the same if I called my local council? I doubt it - for a start, the problem of integrating different sets of data and back-end systems is many times greater. For the bank, there are relatively few services to talk about whereas a local council typically deals with hundreds of different types of queries about a multitude of services.

The drivers to improve communication between the customer and the organisation are different between private and public sector too. In the private sector there is a single driver: competition. Whilst this might sometimes focus on a very narrow view of profitability - hence call centres trying to shave seconds from the call rather than really listening to customers - competition means that many organisations are recognising the value of customer care and improving their performance in this area.

The public sector however has lots of different drivers and lots of different customers - all of whom it must try to please. As a citizen, I have many ways of interacting with the public sector: as a user of libraries or recycling services, as a parent, as a patient, as a victim of crime, and so on.

More about e-government

Read about silicon.com editor Tony Hallett's experiences interacting with his local council in the Editor's Blog.

In some cases - refuse collection, for example - I am just a customer expecting an efficient service. Other issues are more complex - ensuring my elderly parents have all the support they need, for example.

Here I will need to communicate with different organisations which will probably have different processes and procedures. Some may have performance targets to respond to me in so many days, others may have no targets at all. Such improvements are often driven by political or media pressures - one single accident might mean money spent on a problem that is really a very low risk.

Political lobbying can mean that people or groups who shout loudest get the most attention, rather than those who need it most. Politicians can also be driven by political prejudice - one local council I spoke to recently complained their politicians were simply opposed to working from home in principle, which was hampering efforts to offer better service to clients in a number of departments.

The private sector is able to be more objective, see the whole picture and prioritise projects according to business needs. A key advantage is its ability to segment and prioritise services offered to various types of customers - the public sector has to offer the same level of service to all, and it is often those most difficult to reach who are most in need of its services.

Offering a good level of service does not mean communicating using a single method. Web-enabling local government has brought some benefits but the public sector could do more to understand how people use communications - it's of limited use enabling people to claim housing benefit online if most claimants don't have access to the internet, for instance.

There are segments of society which use mobile phones instead of fixed phones - younger people, those on lower incomes - so why not text them? And as the Public Accounts Committee noted in its recent report on the Department for Work and Pensions, more effort could be made to call back callers (for example, older people) who might be struggling to pay their phone bills.

Despite all of these complexities, the potential for imaginative interaction between government and citizen remains immense. It just requires more 'thinking outside of the box'. Some private-sector lessons should be learnt - segmenting your 'citizen base', for example, and understanding how they want to interact with you, rather than issuing edicts such as 'all services must be online by such and such a date'.

Steps are being taken to better understand how we as citizens interact with government - for example, the government has appointed two customer group directors, one for older people and one for farmers, with aim of bringing together service offerings aimed at these groups.

In the case of services for farmers, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)'s 'whole farm' approach aims to offer farmers a single point of contact to Defra itself and to a number of agencies, reducing the quantity of data input by avoiding duplication and sharing data between agencies, as well as providing a single point of contact for accessing relevant advice and being advised of regulatory changes. If well thought through, such initiatives have the potential to make things easier for the citizen and reduce costs.

One private-sector lesson that should be treated with care, however, is the emphasis on using call centres just to cut down on costs. My local council has resisted the route of a single centre and an endless stream of 'press 1 for planning, 2 for social services etc etc' - and good for them. True, government must be about value for money but this could more easily be delivered by better segmentation and clever thinking, rather than 'one size fits all'.