2006 Leadership in Customer Service Report: Building the Trust

Since 2000, Accenture has assessed the service delivery programs of more than 20 national governments. Over the past few years, we have noticed some consistency: some governments always seem to stay ahead of the curve in vision and in implementation, consistently pushing toward the horizon. As we talk to our clients, they often ask us what these high performers have done to be successful, what challenges they have faced and what lessons they can share.

To answer these questions, Accenture delved into the high-performance aspects of those countries that we had already identified as leaders in 2005. We interviewed nearly four dozen government executives who have been most instrumental in moving their countries to the position they are in today. We examined these leading governments' successful service strategies and learned what they plan to do to sustain leadership in customer service. We probed their "behind the scenes" accomplishments—activities that are perhaps not yet visible externally, but which nevertheless lay the foundation for substantial improvements.

Five key findings emerged from our research:

1. Leading governments are introducing services on par with the best of the private sector.
   While a common perception exists that government trails business in introducing service innovations, our own survey of the landscape shows that this is not always the case. Governments are using a range of technologies to provide impressive services that range from the merely helpful to the truly life changing.
   
   
2. Governments are at a critical juncture for service success.
   Leading executives recognize they have "reached the limit" with their current approaches to customer service. They are re-assessing and re-crafting their customer service strategies, not just to satisfy citizens, but also to create lasting value. They are also veering away from a "best practice," one-size-fits-all template—and putting the "custom" back in government customer service.
   
   
3. Successful governments are advancing by putting in place new modes of operation that vary dramatically from the past.
   Governments now see that much of their existing infrastructure, built for a government-centric view of service, will be inadequate to support their ambitious new strategies. They have begun to implement new internal structures and processes that vary quite dramatically from those of the past, including strong new organizational designs, relentless simplification, business reengineering, consolidation and forays into shared services.
   
   
4. Successful governments are using a combination of four proactive tactics to promote adoption of their service strategies.
   These approaches—the stick, the carrot, marketing pull and high-touch push—are being used to create enthusiasm for their most effective channels.
   
   
5. Today's leaders won't necessarily be tomorrow's leaders.
   What would typically be considered leading service practices in the private sector remain difficult, if not impossible, for some governments. Building the ability to cooperate across boundaries and levels of government also defies easy answers. Future leadership will be contingent upon governments' ability to address challenges that are both broad and deep.
   
   

Governments have reached a defining moment in their journey toward high performance. Their future approaches to citizen service will determine whether they build an implicit trust with citizens and continue to progress—or fail to improve their connections to citizens, and stall.

Transformation of this magnitude certainly takes time, but the payoffs are more than worthwhile. Today, global demographic, socio-economic and political shifts are gathering force, causing governments to consider dramatic change in the way they serve their constituents. They realize their countries cannot thrive on a steady diet of citizen apathy, or worse, distrust.

Leading governments recognize the power of building and maintaining trust: citizens' needs are anticipated and met, and governments use their insights to develop the most effective policy from the outset. They are taking action to develop a new understanding with citizens. The result will be self-renewing high-performance government, in which citizens have confidence in their governments and governments, in turn, sustain and build on that trust over time to foster the most positive social outcomes.

Accenture's recommendations for next steps on the journey toward service trust—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 seven years of in-depth study and Accenture's extensive experience working with hundreds of governments around the globe:

• Drive out complacency.
  
  
  • The leaders of the future will be the ones that have a taste for continuous improvement. When it comes to leadership in customer service, standing still is equivalent to falling behind.
    
    
• Set your own standards for excellence.
  
  
  • Governments in pursuit of high performance must develop a more strategic vision of service that reflects their own culture, aspirations and values.
    
    
• Organize for effective execution.
  
  
  • Tomorrow's leaders will recognize that good policy is possible only when it is linked to good execution. Organizing for effective execution means getting both the top-down and the horizontal organizational structures right.
    
    
• Strengthen connections with the citizen, while using technology to continue to try to push the limits of what can be done online.
  
  
  • Building service trust means getting citizens engaged. Tomorrow's leaders understand that sophisticated technologies, coupled with growing citizens' trust, allows governments to push the boundaries of what services citizens will willingly transact online.
    
    
• Aggressively incorporate private-sector learnings, but in a way that makes sense in a public-service context.
  
  
  • Tomorrow's leaders will aggressively pursue the private-sector's best thinking and lessons learned. They seek out the innovations and fold them into the governmental framework.
    
    
• Develop accountability and transparency, especially across initiatives that span multiple governmental organizations.
  
  
  • How well governments act as one—both within and across jurisdictions—depends on strong models for building accountability that will ensure progress is made.
    
    
• Develop continuity of leadership.
  
  
  • Without continuity of leadership, transformative initiatives quite easily fall apart. Even in countries with frequent turnover of administrations, leadership continuity can be established in the ranks of the civil service.
    
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