- Who are our customers? – Given the universal nature of their ‘customer base’ it behooves government to thoroughly understand (through careful analysis) the demographics and behavior of that base.
By dint of the scope for government services and the range of positive outcomes - governments must be selective and prioritize those groups or individuals for which government services will achieve priority outcomes and national or regional objectives.
In this way services can be designed first to meet the needs of the customer (customer-centric) and secondly meet the efficiency and financial requirements of the agencies themselves.
- What services do our customers want? – Like most things in life, services often follow the 80:20 rule (or Pareto rule).
20% of the services that are or could be provided have or would have 80% of the impact (positive outcome) the customer wants or needs. Government needs to understand the totality of the relationship it has with its customer and the totality of the requirement.
Often times, the existing services of one agency only address part of the service requirements of a customer.
It is thus important that government looks to ways and means of providing a one-stop-shop for the resolution of the service to make the service more complete and convenient.
It may thus be necessary to think about complimentary services from other agencies and non-governmental organizations (Hong Kong and UK) and the way all of these services need to inter-operate and the way owning organizations will need to co-operate to fulfill the customer-centric service requirements in full and in a seamless and joined-up way, e.g. Korea, Australia, UK.
- Where are our customers? – To target the customer-centric needs of a chosen group or specific individuals with appropriate customer-centric services; governments must establish a spatial picture of the movements of its customers and where they are likely to be at the time they would most like to request government services.
In this way services can be delivered via appropriate channels to ensure maximum availability, timeliness and convenience. Given the range of possible channels, e.g. internet via home PCs and mobile phones, mediated service centers, call centers, etc.,
Careful planning should be put in place to ensure these are integrated such that a channel chosen at the beginning of a transaction can be married up with a channel chosen at the end of a transaction, e.g. Korea.
- When will our customers require a service? – To provide timely customer-centric services to customers; governments must understand the temporal nature of demand for services and respond accordingly – both in the short and longer term.
This is critical when services include a manual element and are not entirely automatic. The nature of a particular service will often dictate when it will be requested and when it needs to be enacted or completed.
Non-essential services can be time-bound i.e. aspects of the transaction may remain limited to normal office hours, whilst essential services may need to gear up for 24/7 operations – which can have a critical impact on internal operations.
In the longer time frame, governments need to understand the time related events that trigger a request for service – these can be unplanned events such as natural disasters or life events, i.e. the events that characterize the life-cycle of an entity, e.g. a property, organization, e.g. a business or an individual.
For example, the life events of an individual might include birth, school, higher education, work, marriage, family planning, kids, career change, health care and caring, pensions and retirement, death, etc., e.g. UK.
- Why is this service being provided? – Whilst customer-centric service objectives guide most national e-government initiatives – customer convenience and satisfaction are the primary reason why services are being redesigned and re-engineered; not all services have a direct impact on customer satisfaction.
The service may have an indirect effect as is the case with some social welfare or crime related services. Whilst the raison d’etre for e-government is often cited as being more customer-centric, the degree to which this is observed is not written in stone. Cultural differences and national characteristics differ.
Government efficiency and savings are also cited as a reason for providing a service electronically – and no doubt the sustainability of services in the longer term is vitally important.
Effectiveness of services is another much cited reason for the provision of services electronically – providing as it does the ability to release human resources to the ‘front line’ where they can more efficiently and effectively solve the issues relating to its society.
Thus it is important that each government sets out its own e-service charter to guide agencies and customers alike and to set reasonable expectations and provide consistency across the many services government offers or could offer in the future, e.g. UK.
- How will the service be provided? - The guiding principle for government as with the private sector is responsiveness.
Above all customers appreciate services that are responsive to their needs at the time and as a result will continue to use the system.
Customer loyalty and retention is as important to government as it is to the private sector and all means available should be used to retain that customer.
To provide such a personal response, services must not overplay the technology which ideally should remain transparent to users of the service.
Services need to exhibit both ‘high-tech’ and ‘high-touch’ characteristics – where ‘good old fashioned personal service’ is made possible through the technology that quietly underpins it.
Wherever possible governments should strive for simplicity and one of the best ways to achieve this is through common services, e.g. change of address.
To remain responsive requires that customer-centric services change to accommodate changing customer expectations, changing legislation, etc., i.e. they remain ‘agile’.
This presents something of a technical challenge – but one that can be mitigated by sound architectural design and the adoption of architectural standards, e.g. Service Oriented Architecture SOA principles and common-sense.
System architectures that breaks the system down into sensible interrelated but not interdependent layers, e.g. services, processes, data and technology, use open non-proprietary software, and breaks the services down into its constituent processes such that re-usable software modules or components can be put in place to enact them and can be quickly reassembled in real time to meet different services requirements and scenarios can together provide the necessary agility without the high cost of a total rebuild.
