Leadership in Customer Service Report: Creating Shared Responsibility for Better Outcomes

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For the past nine years, Accenture has been conducting leadership research to help public service organizations around the world serve citizens better. Through our previous Leadership in Customer Service studies, we saw how governments took initial, tentative steps by publishing information online in the late 1990s.

For instance, they increased their efforts in early years of the present century, moving more individualized services and service transactions online. They have upped their efforts again in recent years, expanding their perspective to fulfill their aim to provide truly citizen-centric, integrated, one-stop services as well as to build citizens’ trust in government through better service delivery and content.

In our latest report, Leadership in Customer Service: Creating Shared Responsibility for Better Outcomes, we identified a new imperative for governments to move beyond a focus on service transactions to develop a new kind of relationship with citizens. This relationship should foster deeper trust; improve relevance and transparency of government decision making; improve service design and delivery; and transform the relationship between public services and customers/citizens from one of dependency to one of shared responsibility.

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What makes an organization a leader in customer service? To find out, Accenture conducted 40 interviews with senior government officials throughout Europe, North America and Asia. We also completed secondary research in 21 countries, compiled six case studies in various countries and surveyed 8,600 citizens in person.

All this research tells us what’s happening now with customer relations in governments around the world. It also shows what practices help organizations move toward achieving high performance in customer services and delivery.

Through comprehensive, global research of government organizations, Accenture concluded that there are four key "enabling practices” to create opportunities for true customer service transformation. When applied, they close the gap between expectations and reality, promote the virtuous circle of trust between government and citizens and move toward shared responsibility for better outcomes. These four enabling practices are:

1. Better service starts with better understanding—Governments must differentiate service offerings, based on customer insight and segmentation, to become increasingly well informed about the needs of the people they serve. More importantly, they must respond by targeting services and resources appropriately and ensuring that those who have the greatest need receive help urgently, and those who are most able to help themselves have the opportunities and means to do so.
   
   
2. Engage. Listen. Respond—Government should actively engage citizens, service users and other stakeholders in defining outcomes and designing services. Through educating, informing and involving citizens, government can then begin to build a more positive trust-based relationship, which will lead to coproduction of public value.
   
   
3. Harness all available resources—Governments should use the experience and resources available across government, nonprofits, community groups, private businesses and individual citizens to achieve complex, cross-cutting outcomes. Establishing a “joined-up” approach and connecting people to a network of service providers will help address needs and improve outcomes.
   
   
4. Be transparent. Be accountable. Ask for and act on feedback—Establishing public trust is the goal. Citizens want governments to share their policies and programs more actively and regularly. Doing so actually enhances the economic and social value of this information, fosters a broader awareness and sense of ownership among citizens, and a willingness to act as coproducers of public value.

Governments make bold promises to citizens and are trying to fundamentally change how they structure and deliver services to them. However, evidence from this year’s citizen survey shows that governments are not fully delivering on these promises.

In most countries surveyed, the majority of people do not rate their government highly in delivering on this key mission: to provide customer-friendly services that contribute to a better quality of life for the people they serve.

What must happen to change citizen sentiment? First, governments should achieve the four enabling practices described and discussed in the full report. They should also move the customer service focus beyond the quality of the service transaction toward a relationship with citizens that fosters deeper trust, improves the relevance and transparency of government decision making, improves service design and delivery, and encourages a “coproductive” relationship based on shared responsibility.

Clearly, these are complex aspirations that will take time for governments to put into practice. However, we know that not achieving these goals will lead to eroding public confidence with government and to poor public services. Alternatively, implementing these practices will lead to the services citizens deserve, achieve high performance for government organizations and improve public value.

2007 Leadership in Customer Service Report: Delivering on the Promise

2006 Leadership in Customer Service Report: Building the Trust

2005 Leadership in Customer Service Report: New Expectations, New Experiences

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