2007 Leadership in Customer Service: Delivering on the Promise

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For nearly a decade, Accenture has tracked the progress governments have made in moving toward high performance through leadership in customer service. In this, our eighth and most far-reaching report to date, Leadership in Customer Service: Delivering on the Promise, we find governments at an important crossroads.

After years of focusing primarily on improvements to the front end of service, governments have bred expectations of an entirely new customer experience. Their approach for years was to focus on existing services in multiple channels (particularly the online ones) in an approximation of citizen-centricity. This approach unintentionally widened the gap between service provision and value. What governments have not done is make the wholesale infrastructural and cultural changes to actuate their vision. Citizens used these newly available channels expecting consistent levels of service. Instead, it became apparent that the back-end infrastructure of many government organizations was inadequate, resulting in a poor customer experience.

Our goal in Leadership in Customer Service: Delivering on the Promise is to help governments map out the important next steps toward high performance. We pull together many elements—a point in time picture of government’s current performance, hard-earned wisdom from government executives, feedback from citizens and our own insights and recommendations built on extensive research and client experience—to point governments toward the customer service competencies they must now develop to close that loop between promise and practice, and to truly deliver the public service value citizens expect and rightfully demand.

Since 2000, Accenture has been plotting the evolution of leadership in customer service of more than 20 national governments. We have once again spent time talking with top government executives about their current challenges and priorities. A common theme was struck across the more than 50 government executives we interviewed—these executives realize they have arrived at a point where they must close the loop between what they have promised and what they deliver.

In addition, while we have conducted citizen surveys as part of this research for several years, this year—for the first time—we have included results from the citizen survey as a component of our overall rankings. And accounting for citizen experience changes the picture of who leads in customer service in some very interesting ways.

In this the eighth year of our exploration of customer service in government, Accenture takes its most ambitious look at how governments are moving along their paths of high performance. High-performance governments are the ones that deliver the greatest service value—better outcomes, more cost effectively. Accenture believes that delivering s
uch value is a direct result of leadership in customer service.

This 2007 service report explores what sets apart the world’s government service leaders—those that ranked highest in the report. From interviews with government executives and citizens from over 20 countries, the report aims to point governments toward the service capabilities they must now develop to close the gap between promise and practice, and to truly deliver the service value citizens expect and rightfully demand.

Four key findings emerged from our research:

1. Leading governments are moving beyond basic customer demographic categories to customer groups based on precise factors that include behavior and attitudes.
   
   As the majority of governments continue to struggle with the fundamental principle of “knowing their customers,” innovators are moving beyond basic demographic categories and thinking of customers as groups based on more meaningful factors that include what the customer truly needs.
   
   Citizen-centricity, arguably the most important pillar of leadership in customer service, is predicated on governments’ having a clear understanding of who their citizens are and what their intentions are in their interactions with government. For governments to deliver greater public service value (the right balance of service and cost-efficiency), they must first define what their customer-centric service model will be based on this understanding.
   
   
2. Governments are now turning their attention to creating the infrastructure that will allow them to fulfill the service promises they have made.
   
   After years of setting expectations of citizen-centric service through a focus on the service front end, governments are expanding their view to the hard and time-consuming (and often thankless) task of creating the flexible infrastructure—including technological, funding and governance components—that will allow them to fulfill the service promises they have made. While governments understand that their visions of customer service will evolve over time, they are devoting more of their attention now to making their existing visions operational—driving their current front-office customer service strategies into the back end. The time has come to create the infrastructure that closes the loop between expectation and experience.
   
   
3. Many governments continue to underestimate the impact of the workforce—and what restructuring must take place to align people with new technology-enabled ways of working.
   
   The impending shortage of skilled labor is just one part of government’s challenge. More likely to be missed is the imperative for an entirely new type of public-sector employee—one who serves the customer over the process. In the end, frontline employees will have the biggest impact on the customer experience, and many governments are unsure of how to foster the enterprise-wide behavioral changes needed for positive service outcomes. Yet, despite the fact that many governments are wasting their efforts without robust workforce strategies, we find that innovative governments have met the challenge head-on, and have developed strategies along one of two lines: ramping up their workforces through extensive recruiting and training or opting for smaller numbers of highly engaged people.
   
   
4. As governments look to the future, they realize they cannot deliver on the full promise of leadership in customer service on their own.
   
   Governments’ linear, process-oriented business models are evolving into complex ecosystems of citizens, business partners, non-governmental organizations and other stakeholders to design and deliver services. Innovative governments are taking advantage of the increasing engagement of citizens and businesses to re-establish mutual responsibility for developing value-led services. In this new ecosystem model, governments also devolve service accountability to the relevant community for a new ability to drive outcomes. Local and municipal governments in turn are given the chance to tailor what they do for the particular citizens that live there, leading to new thinking about delivering services not just to individuals, but also to families and communities.

Governments everywhere are struggling to balance a shift from the front end to the back end of their customer service operations. After years of focusing primarily on the front end, governments are now trying to take a more holistic approach. While they are still trying to bring things together for citizens at the front office, they realize they have come to the point where they need to concrete plans for making a superior front end customer experience operational on the back end. In short, that means a noticeably renewed emphasis on the infrastructures and workforce that will be able to take the promise of citizen-centered service through to practice.

Governments have learned that there is a big difference between having a vision of customer service and defining in explicit terms what the customer service experience is going to be for citizens and what the outcomes that represent value are. In fact, the Accenture Institute for Public Service Value has identified four discrete dimensions to public service outcomes: the needs of the individual being served, the collective needs of society, the concerns of taxpayers and the authorizing directives of political leaders.

Then there is the problem of how to join up government to make it happen. Governments are realizing that they face a long road ahead. The work that lies before them lacks much of the glamour and public appeal of the splashy front-end innovations of years past, but will be essential for delivering on the promise that citizens have already been led to expect and await.

Accenture’s recommendations for next steps on the journey toward delivering on the promise of government—and ultimately, high performance—stem not only from what we have learned in our research this year, but also from an understanding of public-sector service based on our eight years of in-depth study and Accenture’s extensive experience working with hundreds of governments around the globe.

Our recommendations are organized into three main areas, which we consider the main building blocks of an effective government customer service program: a citizen-centric vision, an enabling infrastructure, and a high-performing workforce.

Build an actionable citizen-centric service vision.
Building a citizen-centric vision implies first understanding citizens deeply, and then ensuring services are customized to each segment based on service needs and service access preferences.

• Refine your customer segment groups.
  
  
• Develop an operating model that balances the customer experience with the cost to serve.
  
  
• Use a more refined view of the customer to develop the channel strategies (including self-service offerings) that make the most sense for citizens and governments.

Build the enabling infrastructure to make the citizen-centric vision operational.
The last decade has seen governments rushing to take advantage of new technologies to better serve their citizens. Beginning with eGovernment and later, across multiple new channels, governments looked to the introduction of innovative service delivery vehicles as a proxy for true citizen-centered service. The services themselves, however, were not radically changed. The result was that governments unintentionally widened the gap between service provision and value. They made the promise of leadership in customer service on the front end and were then unable to deliver through their back-end infrastructures.

• Define the processes and workflows needed to reach the vision…
  
  
• …And don’t wait to get started putting them in place.
  
  
• Take advantage of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and shared services as flexible solutions to disparities in government infrastructures.

Build the high-performing workforce that can drive the vision through to fulfillment.
Because ultimately it is governments’ employees that make excellent customer service happen, governments need to develop, recruit and retain the right workforce with the right skills in the right roles. Self-service websites have increasingly automated the easy interactions with citizens, leaving nothing but the hard problems for the remaining people to solve. What that means is that for public servants to be able to deliver real public service value in the future, they will need deep customer relationship management skills that, to date, have not been the focus of governments.

• Diagnose your existing workforce situation and identify and build critical skills to fill the gaps.
  
  
• Enable on-the-job support to improve performance and build a culture of collaboration.
  
  
• Retain top performers and motivate employees to maintain service levels and organizational performance.